SASAKI Sadako

At the time of the nuclear bombing, Sadako was two and a half years old. She was at home with her family, eating breakfast, in Hiroshima’s Kusunoki neighbourhood, around 1.7 kilometres from the hypocentre. The force of the explosion threw her across the room.

However, Sadako appeared unharmed, having sustained no burns or other visible injuries. Yet, unbeknownst to her parents, ionising radiation from the nuclear bomb had entered her body and damaged her cells, and would eventually induce a deadly disease.

Almost a decade after the bombing, in the winter of 1954–55, Sadako came down with a cold. She was in the sixth grade at Nobori-cho Elementary School at the time, and had never before had any kind of serious illness. Two months later, she was still unwell.

Her parents decided to take her to the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital, where doctors tested her blood and diagnosed her with acute malignant lymph gland leukaemia, a type of cancer of the blood. They said that she had between three and six months to live.

“Why on earth did this awful disease attack Sadako?” her father, Shigeo, asked decades later in an interview. “I felt so sad, so devastated. It was very difficult for us not to show her our tears. However, we tried hard to stay calm and composed.”

In the early days of her hospitalisation, Sadako’s mother, Fujiko, sewed her daughter a beautiful kimono with silk cloth to brighten her spirits. It had a cherry blossom pattern on it, and Sadako seemed happy wearing it.

Fujiko visited the hospital every night after working long hours at the family’s barbershop and performing household chores. Sometimes she arrived as late as 11 o’clock. She always enjoyed braiding her daughter’s long hair.

As months passed, Sadako grew increasingly concerned about the financial burden that her hospitalisation was having on her family. Blood transfusions and treatments for her purpura – purple spots on the skin caused by internal bleeding – were very expensive.

“It was painful for us to know that our daughter was so concerned for her family and was trying not to burden us with her medical expenses,” her father reflected.

During her time in hospital, Sadako learned of the Japanese legend that one’s wish would be granted if one folded a thousand paper cranes. A girl two years her senior who was sharing her room taught Sadako how to fold them.

“From then on, Sadako folded cranes constantly,” Shigeo recalled. “Her wish was to leave the hospital as soon as possible in order to enter junior high school.” She had been hospitalised just before she was due to graduate from elementary school.

Sadako made the origami cranes using many kinds of paper, including the wrappings from medicines and lollies. Some of the cranes were so tiny – no larger than a grain of rice – that she had to use a needle to fold them.

“Her wish was so urgent that she endured the pain of her illness and devoted herself to folding cranes,” Shigeo said.

Occasionally, Sadako’s condition would improve, but then she would relapse and experience severe pain. Throughout her hospitalisation, she remained optimistic, as did her parents. “We would say to ourselves, she will recover, she will come home!”

For a few weeks in the summer of 1955, Sadako was able to spend weekends at home with her family. However, by October her condition had worsened. The joints of her arms and legs swelled and turned purple, and her appetite weakened.

Early on in her hospitalisation, she would walk to the elevator to wave goodbye to her mother each night with a big smile. But she had grown frail and now lacked the energy to do so. Tears welled in her eyes and streamed down her cheeks whenever Fujiko left.

“Don’t cry, Sada-chan, or I can’t go home,” Fujiko would say, referring to her daughter affectionately. (Sada-chan is also how the nurses at the hospital addressed her.)

Soon, Sadako lost the ability to walk and could no longer go to the bathroom by herself. Fujiko carried her there on her back, and was saddened to find that her 12-year-old daughter had become as light as an infant.

“Still she kept folding cranes even in that devastated condition with her skinny arms outstretched, lying in bed,” Shigeo recalled. “I often said, ‘Don’t try so hard, my dear.’ She always responded, ‘Don’t worry, Dad.’”

Many of Sadako’s paper cranes hung from the ceiling in her hospital room. Countless more were in a box. Eventually she would far exceed her goal of folding one thousand.

On good days, when her pain and swelling subsided, she would visit some of the younger patients in other rooms at the hospital and care for them. They enjoyed listening to the radio together. She was very popular there.

On 25 October, Sadako’s condition became critical. She had not eaten anything for over two days. Her father fetched her some ochazuke – boiled rice with hot green tea poured over it – and she began to eat. “Tasty,” she said slowly. That was her final word.

She closed her eyes and died at around 10 o’clock that morning.

“Until her very last moment, she held onto her wish and made a great effort to survive,” Shigeo said. “However, she couldn’t be revived.”

Many of Sadako’s teachers and friends attended her funeral. She was dressed in the cherry blossom kimono that her mother had lovingly sewn for her. Everyone present received one of her paper cranes, which she had kept folding until the day of her death.

For more than a month afterwards, her father rode his bicycle each night to a shrine that faced the Red Cross Hospital. He would look up at the room where his daughter had spent her dying days and could see strings of paper canes still dangling from the ceiling.

“I loved her so much that I couldn’t come to terms with her death for a long time,” he said.

During her hospitalisation, Sadako had been repeatedly examined by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), a US government initiative to better understand nuclear bombs’ effects on humans. Years later, Shigeo learned that the commission’s examinations were purely for the purpose of gathering data, not curing her. He trembled with resentment.

“I will never forget her cries of pain when a needle was forced into her bone marrow to extract fluid. ‘Ow, Dad! Ow!’ Her body was hunched over. In my heart she has remained as she was at that time.”

The ABCC also thoroughly examined Sadako’s body after she died. As a result, her corpse was “in a pitiful state” at her funeral, according to her father.

In the years following her death, Sadako’s former schoolmates worked enthusiastically to establish a monument in her memory – and in memory of the many thousands of other children who were killed in the nuclear bombing.

They called for donations from people all over Japan to fund its construction. Some donations and letters of support were even received from abroad.

The monument was completed in 1958, and a bronze statue representing Sadako sits at the top, with a large paper crane held high above her head.

On the day of the dedication ceremony, Sadako’s father could not hold back his tears. “What I only pray for is that all the people in the world will live happily, and that the world will be free from wars and nuclear weapons.”

Shigeo and Fujiko described their eldest daughter as strong-willed, reliable, warm-hearted, thoughtful and lively. She never complained about anything.

Her elder brother, Masahiro, wrote a detailed account of her life. “Innocent children were sacrificed in the war started by adults,” he said. “Until nuclear weapons are abolished from the world, I will never give up and will continue to tell her story.”

Sadako also had a younger brother, Eiji, and younger sister, Mitsue, both of whom were born after the war.

Her tragic story continues to inspire countless people around the world to work for peace and a nuclear-weapon-free future.