Keiko Ziak's grandfather was one of over 1 million Japanese soldiers who went missing in action in World War II. More than 60 years later, her family received a flag he'd carried into battle, taken as a wartime souvenir and ultimately returned to them by the son of a Canadian military memorabilia collector.

“It’s a miracle that happened,” Keiko Ziak told The Daily Astorian. “I passed that story on to [my husband] Rex. He researched it and we found out that so many miracles could happen.”

The Japanese-American couple founded a project to help veterans and their families, and other citizens, return these flags to their families in Japan. They named their effort OBON 2015, after the Japanese season when ancestors’ spirits are honored. 

Known as good luck flags, yosegaki hinomaru is literally translated as “group-written flag.” Every young Japanese sent off to war carried one imprinted with blessings and messages from their family. They carried them in their pockets. Countless numbers were taken from the corpses of the 2 million soldiers who wouldn't return home alive.

“All the people who cared about that person, all the people who thought about him, were going to war with him,” says Rex Ziak about the flags. Today, these flags represent the only trace of most of those who died in the war. Bringing the flag home represents the return of the ancestors' spirit.

Earlier this week, in a former train depot in Astoria which once sent US troops off to the very battlefields where these flags were taken, OBON 2015 held a Returning Ceremony. Attended by members of the National Guard units that served in World War II, veterans now in their 90s and their families, the ceremony was the first official public transfer of the flags in America. Five flags were presented to Hiroshi Furusawa, Consul General of Japan to Portland.

These five flags are among the 100 or so OBON 2015 has collected. With Rex working the American channels and Keiko the Japanese, they've reunited 30 of these flags with Japanese families. To overcome the challenges of changing Japanese script and the elimination of phone books, they've recruited a panel of scholars along with departments of health and veterans affairs, and religious leaders. 

“To me, it’s very spiritual,” Keiko Ziak told The Daily Astorian. “We believe this is the right thing to do on both sides of the ocean.” For Rex: “This is making peace at a family level.”

Buck Weatherill, giving the thumbs up sign in the photo above, is one of the Oregon vets who returned the flag he took from a dead Japanese soldier. "I just thought, the war is over. We're not enemies anymore, we're friends,” he said at the ceremony. “They should get the flag back."

Listen to the Ziaks discuss their project and the Ceremony of Return on Oregon Public Radio. Read more about the US vets and their families who are returning the flags. Donate to support the project through the OBON 2015 web site.

If one of the great sorrows of my life is that I never gave birth to children of my own, one of the great joys is that I get to borrow some of the best, every week. 

In addition to weekly play dates with my goddaughter and godson and niece and nephew, it's been a joy to reinvent traditions with them. I've written before about our 4th of July Fairy Log, Chinese New Year, and a special Memorial Day bestowal of my father's veteran's flag. 

Birthdays follow a fairly standard template, but last year we started a new tradition with horse-crazy Josie. She'd become enamored of Amber's Breyer horse collection, which had been relegated to boxes in the basement for years. At some point we'd decided to bring them up and display them on the bookcases in our front hall. 

Soon every visit to our house found Josie clamoring to take the horses down so she could feed them, water them, and enact elaborate scenarios involving migrations, wars, games, and family life. Check out the video below for an equestrian competition in which she apologetically (with British accent) deems the horses' trotting "kind of boring". 

It was Amber's idea to begin bequeathing the horses to Josie to take home as her very own. We started with one special stallion with a fancy braided bridle. But when she turned 7 we invited her to choose 7. In the lead-up to her most recent 8th birthday, her anticipation built around which 8 she'd pick. She was guided by one clear principle: she'd realized in the year since she'd turned 7 that these horses came in family units, groupings she'd inadvertently split up when she'd made her first choices. For her 8th birthday she was determined to reunite the separated families.

Josie's collection grows as Amber's dwindles. Next year 9 horses will traverse the mile between our houses and tether her generation to ours, joining her ability to be so magically present to the memory of our now long-ago childhoods on the great wheel of life.

We all know the aphorism "It takes a village." Lately, I've become much more interested in what makes a village. 

Stephen Jenkinson says, "How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead: this work makes our village life, or breaks it." 

In the last week, two posts in Facebook groups I follow have illustrated the proposition that, as Canadian death midwife Sarah Kerr puts it, "The mark of a good death is that it's a village-making event."

Sarah's observations, and her work, are described in A Soft Goodbye, an excellent on-line article in The Walrus on "How a death midwife helped the author and her family grieve the loss of a cherished relative." Sarah continues: "Death is not a mistake. It’s not something the world shouldn’t have. It serves a purpose. And it brings people together when it’s done right.”

The second post came from my Orphan Wisdom classmate Carrie Stearns whose essay on her partner's death, "The Brilliance of Dying" appeared on my blog last fall. Carrie shared an article from her local paper with this note: "Here is a beautiful example of a village growing in the face of death. My daughter's class mate died this morning in her Mama's arms and the community is weeping and sharing like never before."

Carrie's post linked to the story of 17 year-old Leyla who had just died of brain cancer: "Ithaca mourns death of teen whose battle with cancer inspired a village." 

"Leyla’s two-year long struggle with cancer has inspired countless others, including a 1,000-plus member online community called Leyla’s Village, to 'Live Life Like Leyla' and embrace all the beauty of life and set aside its trivialities and minor stresses."

In Stephen Jenkinson's small book How It All Could Be: A Work Book for Dying People and Those Who Love Them he ends with a prayer "...that your people will be blessed by your coming and your going, that ...they will marvel at your way of going out from among them, and that you might be reason enough for them to continue for a while...."

Reading some of the posts in Leyla's Village makes it clear that the manner of her death, the way she went out from among them, made a village. She indeed gave her people reason enough to continue without her, hearts broken open though they be.

When I was just 26 years old and barely qualified, I was hired as executive director of Oregon's statewide coalition of battered women's shelters and rape hotlines. Three of the women I met through that work remain my closest friends. Some were mentors from the founders' era, good enough to help me learn what I didn't know I needed to learn. Some were comrades, doing the work with me, side-by-side. 

Comrade-in-chief was Marcy Westerling. Director of the women's resource center in a struggling rural county northwest of Portland, she stepped forward to chair the state coalition board during the key years of my five-year tenure. My apartment became her pied-à-terre in town; her houseboat was my country escape. We protested in the nation's capitol together. We strategized any number of internal and external political dilemmas. We became family. And when she was ready to leave Columbia County Women's Resource Center to found the Rural Organizing Project, my office served as fiscal sponsor.

As readers of my earlier posts about Marcy know, she's been living with Stage IV ovarian cancer for nearly five years now. While it sidelined her from her daily work in small-town communities, it hasn't kept her from forging new roles as a leader. Her blog, Livingly Dying, has built a large, devoted audience around the world with her truths from the frontlines of medical science.

And she's been diligently documenting her life's legacy, alongside the stories of dozens of other everyday activists, in a new project called Rural Oregon Voices. Last Sunday a large crowd abandoned the early spring sunshine to gather at the Peace House for a preview of this extraordinary project, shepherded by former ROP organizer Sarah Loose. 

I defy anyone to listen to the 7 minute teaser of the oral history clip featured below without wanting to hear more. The verdict in the room was unanimous - people doubled and tripled what they'd planned to give in support of the project (and the Marcy Westerling Collection on Rural Organizing being established at the University of Oregon). In a world steeped in cynicism and despair, where communication is now meted out in screen shots and sound bites, we need these stories. 

Please join me in making a donation to this important project, to make these stories available to the people whose lives they will change.