Jun Hamamoto

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Jun Hamamoto arrived at San Quentin State Prison eager to share photos of her trip with some of the incarcerated men. She had been to a conference in Japan, held in honor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki days. A memorial at the event included 4,000 folded-paper cranes—symbols of peace—that the San Quentin inmates had made. Hamamoto had hand-delivered the cranes to a hibakusha group, survivors of the bombs. "That was very powerful," she says. "And the men were so happy to see the photos."

A practicing Buddhist and adviser to the Mindful Peacebuilding organization, Hamamoto is a scientific engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who was teaching math at San Quentin when she began folding cranes for the World Tree of Hope in San Francisco. She invited the men in the prison’s Kid CAT group—inmates who received life sentences as juveniles—to contribute to the tree. "They were so enthu­siastic," she says. "They folded cranes and wrote messages of hope."

Soon, other men at San Quentin wanted to learn origami too, so Hamamoto began holding workshops. "They found that folding origami was relaxing—kind of meditative," says Hamamoto, an Albany resident. Origami promotes focused-attention meditation, in which the mind is trained on a task, which has been shown to bring calmness.

Since Hamamoto began teaching origami there four years ago, San Quentin inmates have created tens of thousands of peace cranes, butterflies, hearts, and flowers for social justice causes. "It gives them a sense of belonging, giving back to communities that they had possibly harmed in the past," she notes. "It was much more powerful than I had anticipated."

Some of her students have been released and now teach origami with Hamamoto at events. Reintegrating into society comes with challenges, but they know they can turn to origami. "They’ve told me they fold to relax," she says. "It’s remarkable how much it’s helped them to de-stress."