The Paper Crane

The paper crane is the Japanese symbol of innocence, eternal youth, happiness and good fortune.  Basically you can’t go wrong.  You’d be hard pressed to find a child in Japan who doesn’t know how to fold one.  And when a kid places one in your hand as a gift, it’s a lovely gesture of kindness.  At first you don’t really know what to do or say but it reminds me of when I was their age, and kids would pick up acorns that had fallen from the trees on the school field and give them out to their friends.  You’d inadvertently be stockpiling these things in your desk for the remainder of the school term. It’s rude to toss out ‘presents’ but what do you do with them? 

No doubt you may have heard the story about a young girl by the name of Sadako Sasaki who was two years old at the time the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  While she survived the initial impact of the blast, she did not escape the ‘atomic sickness’ that was to affect a visible number of the population in years to come.  She was diagnosed with cancer.  Her Leukaemia, almost certainly was a direct result of exposure to radiation from the fall out.  The 6^th and 9^th of August 1945, will be forever remembered in the bloody history of two nations.  For Japan where the bombs were dropped and for America where the bombs came from.  No other nuclear weapons have ever been discharged on another nation in any other war or conflict since.  There’s a reason why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the first and only cities in the world to suffer the devastation of an atomic bomb.  If you ever come to Japan, I would strongly recommend that you visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum or its equivalent in Nagasaki and find out why.    

Unfortunately for Sadako, and many others like her, she would not get better, she would not be cured, and she would not return home.

Sadako believed in an old Japanese story that anyone afflicted with sickness would be cured by the Gods, if they made 1000 paper cranes in their honour.  Sadly she succumbed to her illness and died before she could complete her task.  She was 12 years old.  Her family and friends decided to finish it for her.  She was tenderly laid to rest surrounded by all 1000 of her colourful paper cranes.  A statue of a young girl holding a paper crane stands in Hiroshima’s Peace Park, to commemorate Sadako’s short life and the legacy she left behind.  Each year at Obon, held in August, paper cranes from all over Japan are sent in (and maybe even from around the world) to adorn the statue, immortalised in bronze.