Tonight, I have passed the 644 mark, which seemed very far away when I began this experiment.
644 is significant because of a little girl named Sadako Sasaki. She is partly my inspiration for all this. Sadako was born in 1943 and lived in Hiroshima. When the atomic bomb fell, it was near Sadako's home. She was not injured but, like hundreds of thousands of people, exposed to intense radiation. Ten years later, at the age of 12, she was diagnosed with leukemia. While in the hospital, she decided to undertake the Japanese tradition of "senbazuru" -- folding 1,000 origami cranes in hopes of having a wish come true. Sadako's wish, of course, was to survive her illness.
Sadly, that did not happen. She died in 1955, a few months before I was born. One version of the Sadako story says that she finished her 1,000 cranes and folded even more before her death. Another version (the one I like better) says she only made it to 644 -- the same number I completed tonight -- before dying. Her classmates at school folded the remaining cranes and all 1,000 were buried with Sadako.
Either way, it's a stirring story, one that has inspired a book, several songs and two memorials to Sadako -- one at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima and another in Seattle. At the memorial in Hiroshima, schoolchildren constantly visit with offerings of paper cranes they've folded. (An interesting aside: The "world's largest peace crane," with a wingspan of more than 200 feet, was constructed inside the Seattle Kingdome in 1999. It was made from hundreds of scraps of paper with peace wishes written on them by children from all over the world.)
Supposedly, Sadako composed a haiku about her crane folding. It shows that her wish went far beyond being cured of her illness. Her wish was the same as mine -- peace.
The English translation of Sadako's haiku:
"I shall write peace upon your wings, your heart and you shall fly around the world so that children will no longer have to die this way."
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