Click here to watch us making paper cranes. It links in great with our geometry unit :)
“If there is to be peace in the world,
“If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbours.
If there are to be peace between neighbours,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.”
- Lao Tzu
SADAKO AND THE 1000 PAPER CRANES
On August 6th, 1945, World War II’s Allied forces dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of
Hiroshima. Instantly the city was destroyed. When the dust had cleared, people’s shadows remained
frozen on footpaths and the sides of buildings. The people themselves simply vanished. On that tragic
day it is estimated that up to 180 000 people were killed.
The Sasaki family lived one mile from where the bomb went off. The couple and their two-year-old
daughter, Sadako, managed to survive the nuclear attack, though soon after the explosion, thick black
clouds of radioactive soot and dust began to fall like snow. Though the family tried to protect
themselves, they could not avoid breathing the contaminated air.
As time went on, they tried to rebuild their damaged lives. The Sasakis had three more children. As
Sadako grew older, she became a strong, healthy young woman and was the fastest runner on her
school athletics team.
But when Sadako was twelve years old, she noticed that her lymph nodes were becoming swollen. A
doctor’s visit confirmed her parents’ fears: Sadako had radiation poisoning from the atomic bomb. She was dying of leukemia. Soon, Sadako entered the Hiroshima Red Cross hospital for treatment. She spent months there with her disease worsening by the day. In August 1955, residents of Nagoya sent a gift of colored origami paper cranes to Sadako and the other hospital residents as a get-well
present. The gift brightened her day and it gave her an idea.
She believed in a saying that if you fold a thousand cranes, you’d get over your sickness. She folded
paper cranes carefully, one by one, using paper from newspapers and medicine wrappings.
Though she was very weak, Sadako dedicated hours each day to folding cranes out of whatever
materials she could find. She insisted she had to keep folding because she had a plan. When she
got to one thousand she kept on going, hopeful that the paper birds might magically cure her illness.
But it was not to be: Sadako died on the morning of October 25, 1955, surrounded by her family.
As for Sadako’s thousand paper cranes, her mother gave some of them to her school friends,
and put the rest of them in her coffin so that she could bring them to the next world.
Although Sadako’s thousand paper cranes could not save her life, they took flight in another
way, serving as a symbol of the growing movement for peace on Earth.
The following year, an Austrian journalist, Robert Jungk, travelled to Hiroshima, where he heard
the story of young Sadako and her one thousand cranes. He was so moved by her
determination that he told her story in a book, ‘Light in the Ruins.’ In the years since, variations
of Sadako’s story have appeared in hundreds of other publications.
After Sadako’s death, her classmates wanted to honour their friend by creating a monument to
mourn all the children who died from the atomic bombing. With support from more than 3,100
schools around the world, the students created a nine-meter high bronze statue, topped with a
figure of a girl holding a folded crane. Beneath the pedestal, there is an inscription:
“This is our cry. This is our prayer. For building peace in this world.”
Each year, people from all over the world travel to the Children’s Peace Monument, bringing
their own folded paper cranes as a gift to Sadako’s memory and as a symbol of their desire for
peace. In hundreds of other cities around the world children have become involved in projects to
create paper cranes as symbols of peace.
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