Text and photograph of the parents of Sadako Sasaki by Robert Del Tredici, Kasuga City, Fukuoka, Japan, October 14, 1984. Fujiko Sasaki, beside her husband Shigeo, holds a portrait of Sadako, their12-year old daughter. Sadako and her mother were in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb exploded. Sadako was two years old at the time. The words under the photograph read: Sadako Sasaki, First year, Nobori-machi Junior High School, Sub-acute lymphatic leukemia. Died October 25, 1955.
When Sadako was 12 she contracted leukemia from earlier exposure to the atomic bomb. She did not wish to die. She refused all pain-killing medication and took literally a Japanese proverb that says, “If you fold 1,000 paper cranes you will get whatever you wish.” She folded 645 of the tiny birds before she died. Here classmates folded more cranes to bring the total to 1,000. Each year some four million paper cranes arrive in Hiroshima from children throughout Japan and from all over the world. The cranes are strung mostly in garlands of one thousand and placed at Sadako’s shrine and at other monuments in the Hiroshima Peace Park.