Sadako Sasaki

Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who is remembered through the story ‘Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes’.

Sadako Sasaki was only 2 years old when the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. The bomb exploded on 2 kilometres away from her home. Most of her neighbours died that day but Sadako was seemingly unhurt.

Up until the time she was in 7th grade (which was in 1955), Sadako seemed to be a normal, happy girl. However, after helping her team win an important relay race, she began to feel very faint and fatigued. She put that feeling down to exhaustion of just running a relay race. This was until she experienced these symptoms more frequently.

One day during school, she was so dizzy, she was unable to stand. Her classmates alerted her teacher and Sadako went to the hospital later that day. Tests were done and it was discovered that Sadako had leukemia.

Sadako was a good student so naturally she wanted to be at school learning and hanging out with her friends. Instead, she had to spend her time in hospital where she cried.

Shortly after she was diagnosed with leukemia, her best friend Chizuko visited her in the hospital. She brought a gift of origami paper. Chizuko told Sadako of a legend that is she folded 1,000 paper cranes, she would be granted 1 wish. Instinctivly, Sadako started making paper cranes and wished for good health.

Sadako’s family worried about her a lot. They spent many hours at her bedside helping her make paper cranes. After she had folded 500 cranes, the doctors said Sadako was well enough to go home for a short period of time. However, by the end of the first week, Sadako’s symptoms had gotten worse and she was returned to hospital.

At the hospital, Sadako continued to fold paper cranes even though she was in immense pain. On October 25, 1955, Sadako passed away peacefully in her hospital bed with her family by her side. She had folded a total of 644 paper cranes.

Everyone at her school was saddened by Sadako’s death. 39 children even formed a paper plane club to honour her. Word spread quickly. Students from 3,100 schools and from 9 foreign countries gave money to the cause. On May 5, 1958, almost 3 years after Sadako had died, enough money was collected to build a monument in her honour. It is now known as the Children’s Peace Monument, and is located in the center of Hiroshima Peace Park, close to the spot where the atomic bomb was dropped.

Children and adults from all over the world still send folded paper cranes to be placed beneath Sadako’s statue. In so doing, they make the same wish which is engraved on the base of the statue:

This is our cry, This is our prayer, Peace in the world“.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Tsutomu Yamaguchi died from stomach cancer.  The cancer part perhaps isn’t surprising given that Yamaguchi is currently the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having lived through the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Note: There were actually well over a 100 or so others as well, perhaps as many as 165; they just have never been officially recognized by the Japanese government to date.)  What is surprising, given that history, is that Yamaguchi avoided the disease for so long, not dying until January 4, 2010, at the age of 93. At the age of 29, Yamaguchi was on his way back home from a three month long business trip to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.  At the time, he was an engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries- specifically, working as an oil tanker designer. On his way to the train station to head back to his home in Nagasaki, he noticed he’d forgotten his travel permit and went back to get it while his colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, went on. He picked up his pass and was on his way back to the station when, at 8:15 a.m., he saw a bomber flying over the city and “two small parachutes”, then a rush of blinding light, sound, wind, and heat knocked him to the ground. Mr. Yamaguchi had the misfortune of being approximately 3 km from a nuclear blast.  The immediate effects of this were his ear drums rupturing, temporarily blindness, and burns over much of his upper body. After his initial disorientation, and in spite of his injuries, Tsutomu managed to make his way to an air-raid shelter where he met up with his two colleagues who had also survived the blast. He spent the night in the shelter and in the morning he and his co-workers headed back to Nagasaki via train as originally planned.  When he arrived, he received bandage treatments from a local hospital, and even felt well enough to report for work on August the 9th, just 3 days later… (Now I feel like a bit of a pansy about taking a full week off while I had the flu.) Of course, Yamaguchi had to explain his burns to his coworkers. His boss was in disbelief over his claim that it was a single explosion that destroyed much of Hiroshima. “You’re an engineer,” he said to Tsutomu, “calculate it…how could one bomb destroy an entire city?” The boss spoke too soon. According to Yamaguchi, during this conversation the air-raid sirens went off and then, once again, he saw a blinding white light. He dropped to the floor immediately; he was familiar with the drill. Yamaguchi stated, “I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima.” Both bombs exploded near the city centers and both, interestingly enough, were just about 3 kilometers away from Tsutomu’s position at the time.  Despite this explosion being slightly more powerful than the one at Hiroshima (21 kilotons vs. 16 kilotons at Hiroshima), thanks to the city’s uneven terrain and the fact that many parts of the city were divided by water, which prevented the extensive fire damage that happened in Hiroshima, there wasn’t nearly the amount of overall infrastructure damage. Yamaguchi himself experienced no immediate injury from this second explosion, though of course was exposed to another high dose of ionizing radiation and medical supplies to treat his existing burns were now in short supply.

Artice on the Hiroshima Bombing

I thought this was an interesting article because it was something that i never thought about. Please feel free to share your opinions and responses in the comments section!

Hiroshima and how it didn’t end the war