Little Japanese girl folded paper birds while dying of radiation

Young people can join with the Premier League Academies, making folded paper cranes, of the ornithological variety!

Or they can colour in the famous scene from New York’s Times Square on VJ Day in 1945, when an American sailor passionately kissed a passing nurse.

The origami birds, which will be assembled later into a paper wreath, will be laid at the Children’s Peace Monument in the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park.

The enormously moving story behind the monument and the cranes was mentioned here a few weeks ago and I promised to return to it.

VE Day on May 8, 1945 marked the end of WWII in Europe but fighting continued in the Pacific and the Far East between the Allies and Japan.

The Japanese surrendered after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and on Nagasaki on August 9 and Victory over Japan - VJ Day - was celebrated on August 15, 1945.

Of approximately 50 million dead during WWII an estimated 71,000 soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth died in the war against Japan, including more than 12,000 POWs in Japanese prison camps.

Around 214,000 Japanese citizens perished under Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s deadly mushroom clouds, and many more as radiation mercilessly ravaged survivors’ bodies.

The Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park’s Children’s Peace Monument commemorates a heroic little Japanese girl, Sadako Sasaki, born in January 1943.

Her family home was about 1.7 km from the location of the atomic eruption in Hiroshima just over two years later.

Her dad was a hairdresser who was drafted into the Japanese army shortly after her birth,

On August 6, 1945 she was at home with her mum when the atomic bomb erupted above the city.

The blast blew little Sadako out of the house, seemingly uninjured, and her mother fled the firestorm carrying her daughter to a relative’s house nearby.

They were unaware of the invisible but deadly ‘black rain’ - atomic fallout.

Of approximately 350,000 people in the city at the time some 140,000 had died by the end of December, over half of that number on the day of the bombing.

The Sasaki family opened a new barbershop in the city in 1947.

Sadako was a keen athlete at school, hoping to become a PE teacher, when she started to look a little pale.

Toward the end of November 1954 she caught a cold and swellings developed on her neck.

When Sadako’s whole face started swelling she was taken to a doctor for a medical examination early in 1955.

But her symptoms persisted and got worse, with nasty skin blemishes appearing on her body.

Sadako went to a hospital for more precise testing.

The diagnosis was leukaemia - the result of her exposure to ‘black rain’.

The doctor told her dad on February 18, 1955 that she’d probably only a year to live.

On 21 February Sadako entered the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital where her family and school chums visited her regularly.

About a month later she was enrolled for Junior High School, but sadly, she was never to attend.

There is an ancient Japanese legend that says if you fold 1,000 origami paper cranes the gods will grant you a wish.

Stories vary as to who told her the legend. Some say it was her roommate or school-chum in the hospital, some say it was her dad, but Sadako started folding little paper cranes with all the paper at her disposal.

She made them from packing paper, medicine wrappings, or any other paper she could get a hold of.

Some stories say that Sadako never finished her thousand paper cranes, that she only finished 644 and her family and friends finished the remainder for her.

Sadako stringed thread through lines of cranes and hung them from the ceiling of her room in the hospital.

Toward the end of September 1955 her white blood cells began to increase critically and she could no longer walk unassisted.

On the morning of October 25, surrounded by her family, Sadako passed away.

Some of her little paper cranes were put in her coffin when she was buried.

And the memory of Sadako lives on.

Her friends raised funds to build a memorial to her and to all of the children who had died from the effects of the atomic bomb.

In 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

At the foot of the statue is a plaque that reads: “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”

Her family donated some of her origami cranes to the Hiroshima Peace Centre and they’ve become a symbol of peace for children all over the world, displayed in the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, in the 9/11 Tribute Centre in New York and in the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution - to name just a few venues worldwide.

Information about making the cranes, and many other VJ Day 75 resources and events, are at available online at 
https://ve-vjday75.gov.uk.