The Japanese flag was flying outside the conference centre as 64 Japanese arrived in Caux in 1950, to be welcomed by a chorus singing in Japanese. It was a moving moment as back in Japan, still under American occupation, displaying the flag was forbidden. 

The delegation included seven prefectural governors, a number of Diet members and the mayors of four cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the 10 women in the delegation was Yukika Sohma.

Yukika was the daughter of Yukio Ozaki, revered as the father of Japanese parliamentary democracy. He served in the Diet for 63 years, and was imprisoned during the World War II for his opposition to war. For Yukika the years leading up to World War II were ‘like living in suffocation’, as laws were passed to crush liberal thinking. The ideas of Initiatives of Change (formerly known as Moral Re-Armament), which she encountered at this time, were ‘like a fresh breeze blowing from above when all around were tight walls’.

Yukika acted as interpreter for the delegation, as it travelled on to Italy, Germany, France, Britain and the US. Wherever they went, the Mayor of Hiroshima, Shinzo Hamai, gave dignatories a gift from his city: a small cross made out of the heart of an ancient camphor tree, planted when the city was founded in 1589. The outside of the tree had been destroyed by the atomic blast, but its core survived.

On the fifth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, the delegation was in California. They were invited to speak on CBS radio. Yukika described their encounters at the IofC conference centre in Caux as a ‘conference of answers, of results that only need multiplication to build a solid cure to world problems’. In a ‘family of nations where differences of race, of class and of point of view were superseded... we saw and experienced reconciliation of hearts…. We saw that with this new spirit Japan can become reborn.’

Shinzo Hamai also spoke in the broadcast, describing the ‘nightmare’ that had happened to his city. He quoted words that he had had heard at the conference centre in Caux, ‘Peace is people becoming different’ and declared, ‘I for one intend to start this effort from Hiroshima. The one dream and hope left to our surviving citizens is to re-establish the city as a pattern for peace.’

We saw and experienced reconciliation of hearts…. We saw that with this new spirit Japan can become reborn.

In 1952, Hiroshima unveiled a memorial to the victims of the atom bomb, inscribed, ‘Let all the souls here rest in peace, we shall not make the same mistake again.’ On his return from Caux, Hamai had championed this wording against fierce opposition from those who wanted the inscription to condemn the United States.

Yukika Sohma devoted the rest of her life to encouraging Japan to rebuild its relations with its neighbours. In 1979 she called on every Japanese to give one yen to help refugees in Southeast Asia. Within three months she had raised 120 million yen. The organization she founded later became the Association for Aid and Relief, providing humanitarian relief and supporting landmine clearance. She remained its president until she died in 2008.

Also read Yukika's article 'Apology is a key to the future'

Watch this video from our film archives on the Japanese journey for peace.

Watch journalist Chris Mayor remembering his interview with the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during their visit to Caux 1950 (credit: ABC Australia). You can also read more on Chris Mayor and his interview in 1950 by clicking here.

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Video 1: Japanese Journey (credit: IofC Film Archives)
• Video 2: ABC Australia
• Photos: Initiatives of Change

Max Bladeck joined the Communist Party as a young German coal miner in the 1920s. He remained loyal during the Hitler years when tens of thousands of communists were imprisoned or lost their lives. By the time he arrived in Caux in 1949, his lungs were affected by silicosis, and he could no longer work in the mines. He was chair of the works council of one of the pits in his town, Moers, and a member of the Party’s provincial executive for North Rhine-Westphalia.

Max left Caux convinced that there was a better way to social justice than class war. He had seen that capitalists could change their ways and that the path to world peace involved making ‘enemies into friends’. He and other German communists who had been in Caux visited party headquarters to recommend that they find out more about the ‘revolutionizing ideas’ of Moral Re-Armament (now know as Initiatives of Change).

Bladeck had first encountered the ideas of Caux a few months earlier, when an international team came to Moers with "The Forgotten Factor", a play about an industrial conflict being solved through changes in attitudes on all sides. Their visit was part of a two-year campaign in the Ruhr, the heart of Germany’s coal and steel industry. The area was vital for Germany’s reconstruction and a testing ground for Marxist and other approaches to industrial relations. Some 120,000 people in the Ruhr saw the play between 1948 and 1950.

In each town, the cast and crew were accommodated in local homes. Max and his wife, Grethe, offered a sofa in the living-room of their three-room house to a young Norwegian, Jens Wilhelmsen. Every night, the two men sat up late locked in ideological debate. 

Our ideological and political viewpoints were still far apart, but a certain trust was growing between us.

Jens made little progress until he had an unexpected thought in his morning meditation: ‘Stop preaching to Max about everything that is wrong with the cause he has given his life to. Instead tell him where you have a problem living what you preach.’ That evening Jens told Max about times when he had failed to live up to his ideals. To his surprise, Max began to respond in kind. ‘Our ideological and political viewpoints were still far apart, but a certain trust was growing between us.’

After the play left Moers, the town’s political activists and trade unionists came together to discuss the fall-out. The communists were vocal, accusing Moral Re-Armament of playing the class enemy’s game. At the end, Max dropped a bombshell: ‘Comrades! We know that Marxism is the thesis and capitalism is the antithesis. Could it be that Moral Re-Armament is a synthesis?’

This proposition was regarded as heresy. Things only got worse when Max and his colleagues went to Caux. Finally, when they challenged the Communist Party to adopt’s Moral Re-Armament’s approach, they were thrown out of the party and subjected to a campaign of defamation and threats. Yet when the works council elections came round, most received more votes than ever before.

This pattern was repeated all over the Ruhr. Between 1948 and 1950, the communists’ share of seats on the coal and steel works councils fell from 72 per cent to 25 per cent. The improved industrial relations were reflected in a new law on co-determination in heavy industry, which gave employees half the seats on company boards and put the day-to-day running of the company into the hands of three directors, one proposed by the unions.

In 1950, Artur Sträter, Minister of Economics for North Rhine-Westphalia, said that ‘the ideology of Caux’ had broken ‘a great bottleneck’ in Germany’s coal production. Many factors played a part in Germany’s post-war economic miracle: the visits of workers and management to Caux were among them.

Watch a short footage with Max Bladeck in Caux from "Caux first years" (22'45)

• Photos: Initiatives of Change
• Video: IofC Film Archives

Germany was in ruins. Europe was in ruins. Millions had been killed; millions more wounded and displaced. There were also ruins of the mind, deep collective trauma in desperate need of healing. In the summer of 1948, a musical revue was created in Caux, along with a travelling photo exhibition and a booklet, "Es Muss Alles Anders Werden" (Everything must be different). A Swedish paper-maker who was at Caux provided the stock to print one and half million copies.

In October 1948, Frank Buchman and a team of 260 left Caux by bus for Germany. In the words of Irène Laure, a Frenchwoman who’d fought in the resistance to the Nazi occupation of her country, ‘We ploughed our way back and forth across Germany as you plough a field.’ It was described as the largest non-military operation in Germany since the war.

One of the remarkable talents enlisted in this innovative and challenging project was Paul Misraki, a major French composer of popular music and film scores. Over more than 60 years, he wrote the music to 180 films, for directors like Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and Orson Welles.

Born in Constantinople, into a French Jewish family of Italian descent, by the 1930s he had become an established jazz pianist, arranger, and writer of popular songs. He fled France during the World War II German occupation, and ended up in Hollywood. In Caux, Misraki composed a number of songs for the revue, including the music for the title song, to words by Alan Thornhill, an English church minister turned playwright. (Listen to the song "The Good Road" here.)

The photo shows Paul Misraki conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in the Victoria Hall in Geneva (the major concert hall and the major orchestra) as they recorded the soundtrack for the show – necessary because they couldn’t take a full symphony orchestra ‘on the road’ with them in Germany.

The German Peter Petersen (see 1947) was one of the stage crew. In the chorus was 19-year-old Jacqueline Piguet-Koechlin. She and her family had been forced to leave Alsace in 1940. In a booklet of letters home to her parents, she describes in vivid detail the buses winding through the ruins of city after city in Germany. She wrote, ‘This is what I’d wanted. Under the occupation, I’d wanted the Germans to have their share of suffering. When I joined this venture and postponed my university studies for a year, I felt proud of myself for caring for the defeated enemy. But I didn’t know, I couldn’t imagine suffering like this. And I wept.’ 

The team held 200 public meetings and shows in 11 weeks, including in 10 of the 11 state parliaments. In the party were two French Jews, one of whom had lost 15, the other 22, relatives in Nazi concentration camps.

The London News Chronicle quoted a Military Government official as saying, ‘You [Initiatives of Change*] have done more in two days to interpret democracy to the German people than we have been able to do in three years.’

Click here and listen to a recording of the song  "Es muss alles anders werden" (1947/48).

Image

• * then known as Moral Re-Armament
• Photos: Initiatives of Change 
• Recordings: Initiatives of Change

‘At that time, even a dog would have refused a bit of bread from the hand of a German,’ remembered Peter Petersen, one of 150 Germans who the Allies allowed to come to Caux in 1947. They were some of the first Germans to leave their country after World War II.

To their astonishment, Petersen and his companions were greeted not with revulsion but by a French chorus singing a song in German. ‘We were already past masters at defending ourselves when we were accused. But here the doors were wide open for us.’

Petersen had worn a uniform all his life: first as a Hitler Youth, later at a special Nazi school and then in the German army. He had been wounded two weeks before the war ended and imprisoned by the British after the war. Now aged 21, he had no civilian clothes and arrived in Caux in a suit of his grandfather’s, which was both too short and too big for him.

‘Like many Germans I had withdrawn into an attitude which was a mixture of self-pity and bravado,’ Petersen said later. When he and his friends discovered that the Secretary of the Socialist Women of France and member of the French Resistance, Irène Laure, was going to speak at the conference, they braced themselves. ‘We said that if she talks about all that France has suffered, we will have a thing or two to say about the French.’

Her honesty and greatness of spirit made us look at ourselves. We were ashamed of our blindness.

To the Germans’ astonishment, Irène Laure apologized to them publicly for her hatred. ‘It was so unexpected. All our defences crumbled away…. Her honesty and greatness of spirit made us look at ourselves. We were ashamed of our blindness.’

After long discussions among themselves, and some sleepless nights, Petersen and his friends went to talk with Irène Laure. ‘We began to see where we had gone wrong and we told her, because that’s the only way healing can come.’

Between 1948 and 1951, nearly 4,000 more Germans attended conferences at Caux. Petersen was part of an international IofC taskforce (see our story on 1948) which travelled through Germany over the next five years, building the bridges of the heart which made the post-war reconciliation and reconstruction of Europe possible.

In 1965, Peter Petersen was elected to the German Bundestag. During his long political career, he made no secret of his past or of the sacrifices needed to heal relationships with those who had suffered at Germany’s hands.

‘There are two ways of getting rid of the past,’ he said. ‘You can sweep it under the carpet, but there is always the danger that it will pop out somewhere else. Or you can take the way of honesty. It was this characteristic of Caux which allowed us Germans to meet with other people as equals.’

Photos: Initiatives of Change