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January 7, 1943—October 25, 1955

A Child’s Hope for Peace

The death of a single child due to the insanity of war may be the world’s most heinous crime. In the city of Hiroshima, Japan, one monument dedicated in 1958 depicts a young victim of the atomic bomb. The plaque reads, “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”

Sadako Sasaki was only two years old and one mile away from ground zero when the atom bomb named “Little Boy” struck on 6 August 1945. Most of her family miraculously escaped destruction, but the radioactive black rain that subsequently fell upon the city stained Sadako’s clothes. In 1954, at the opening of the Hiroshima peace park, Sadako told her best friend, Chizuko Hamamoto, “I can remember it. There was a flash, like a million suns, then a heat that felt like pricking needles.”

Sadako was a strong, athletic eleven-year-old track runner when she was diagnosed with leukemia, which was most probably caused by her exposure to the bomb’s radiation. Shortly after she was admitted to Hiroshima’s Red Cross hospital, members of her track team visited her, bringing her gifts. One of them, Sadako’s best friend Chizuko, told her the story of the “thousand cranes” after she noticed Sadako admiring the bright paper birds hanging over the hospital beds of other patients.

The tale Chizuko told was the legend of the crane, a creature sacred in Japan for its longevity; cranes were believed to live for one thousand years. Functioning like the prayer flags of India and Tibet, folded paper cranes in Japan connected the human and divine realms. It was believed that the sacred crane favored whoever made the effort to fold a thousand pieces of paper into its shape, and would grant the wish of the maker.

The story renewed Sadako’s hope for recovery from her illness. She longed to rejoin her track team and run relay races once again. So she spent most of her time folding cranes, scrounging scraps of paper—sometimes using even the wrappers on medicine bottles—wherever she could find them. Inside each one, Sadako carefully wrote her wish: Make me well.

Sadako died at the age of twelve after folding thirteen hundred cranes. Her teammates began a campaign to raise funds for a memorial to her—a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane. It stands in her honor and to the memory of all the children who died as a result of the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima. It is one of the world’s most vivid monuments to peace.