Sadako is just one of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who died because of the Hiroshima bomb. Explain in detail how she became such a powerful symbol of the desire for peace?
Answers
After being diagnosed with leukemia from radiation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Sadako's friend told her to fold origami paper cranes (orizuru) in hope of making a thousand of them. She was inspired to do so by the Japanese legend that one who created a thousand origami cranes would be granted a wish..A popular version of the story is that Sasaki fell short of her goal of folding 1,000 cranes, having folded only 644 before her death and that her friends completed the 1,000 and buried them all with her.
Sadako survived the Hiroshima bomb when she was only two years old, but by 1950 she had swollen glands. Officials at the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission, set up by the U.S. government in post-war Japan to examine Hiroshima’s citizens for health effects of the atomic bomb, recommended that she go to the hospital. She was diagnosed with leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow, and died in 1955.
Cranes that Sadako made rest in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Her family donated over a hundred of them to the museum, which has agreed to give them back to her family one crane at a time.
In addition to the September 11 memorial, Sadako Legacy has donated a crane to Pearl Harbor’s USS Arizona Memorial with the help of Daniel, The Peace Library at the Austrian Study Center for Peace, and the city of Okinawa.