Hearing the legend, she decided to fold one thousand origami cranes so that she could live. By the time she was twelve in 1955, she was dying of leukemia. She was then a hibakusha - an atom bomb survivor. Sadako was exposed to the radiation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as an infant, and it took its inevitable toll on her health. The origami crane has become a symbol of peace because of this legend, and because of a young Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki. Legend says that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their heart’s desire come true. In the museum you could read several letters related to the Manhattan Project, for example these two from brigadier general Leslie Groves (in charge of the project) and Albert Einstein:Īs I did in a post I wrote 3 years ago, in order to explain her story I will paste below an excerpt from Wikipedia‘s article on the history of origami (paper birds):
Some parts of the museum are truly shocking. You can spend several hours in the museum: from reading about the life in Hiroshima prior to the war, during the war and before the bombing, about the Manhattan Project, learning from specific cases of victims of the bomb, several testimonies, replicas from wounded people, etc. There we visited the Hiroshima Peace Site, museum and park. Luca and I, together with some friends visited Japan during the summer of 2008. However, I thought of writing this post in order to connect several points related to the story, some of which I have only discovered quite recently…
I guess you have had the chance to read about it in several places along the day. Today, August 6th, in 1945 the Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay” dropped over Hiroshima (Japan) the first nuclear bomb, “ Little Boy“, used in combat.