Relay: A Thousand Paper Cranes

I read The Times last week, safe in my little Sunday bubble at the ocean beach, but with the Aug. 6 anniversary of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima on my mind. Just a few pages in, I was feeling the grace of my privilege — even in the face of my ever-more-common sleepless nights fearing the wolf’s breath at my door — but I was also feeling its weight. 

“I want to give them a beautiful dream . . . to change this black color at least into gray,” said Aeham Ahmad, a Syrian refugee now in Germany, in one newspaper story. From a third-generation Palestinian family exiled to Syria, he was talking about why he played piano in the rubble of his neighborhood there, bombed and cut off from basic needs by the Syrian civil war. 

In a photo on another page, a Japanese mother crouched in front of a pretty expanse, about to drop a lunchbox into the water for her daughter who disappeared in the devastating tsunami five years ago.

Also in the paper, I read the tale of the Olympic team comprising refugees, among them the Syrian girl swimmer who made it to Greece across the Aegean Sea, just barely, because she jumped overboard and, with her sister, spent three hours pulling a foundering raft full of other refugees to shore.

On a teaching trip to Japan in 1991, on a rare free day I took the bullet train from Kyoto to Hiroshima. The lace doilies on the back of the seats were clean, the bento box vendors polite and measured and the sushi well prepared. I emerged from the station and, with only an hour or two until I had to board another train to go back, made my way to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. It was a pilgrimage I felt I had to make.

The open area of the park was once Hiroshima’s downtown, before the United States during World War II dropped “Little Boy,” an atomic bomb, and blasted it into a vacancy, the first use of a nuclear weapon. More than 100,000 were immediately killed, thousands more were injured in the explosion, and radiation exposure would take its toll on many more.

Three days later, American bombers dropped another A-bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Japan surrendered to the Allied forces not long after, on Aug. 15. 

In and around the park there are dozens of memorials and monuments to peace, as well as a museum: a grassy knoll covering the ashes of some 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb; the open shell of one of the few buildings left standing after the bomb, now called the A-Bomb Dome, which survived although all of its occupants died, and gates with “peace” in 49 languages.

What I remember most was a set of concrete steps, the only remainder of a bank that was annihilated at ground zero. There was no color there, only the clear blankness of a white outline, person-shaped, the “nuclear shadow” from the bomb’s thermal radiation — the blank remains, some believe, though the science isn’t clear, of someone vaporized by the nuclear blast. So much writ in an empty shape of a life gone absent instantaneously by that hideous new weapons technology. 

Maybe Sadako Sasaki, the little Japanese girl who lived only a year in the hospital with leukemia caused by the bomb but in that time folded more than the thousand paper cranes that a Japanese proverb holds will make wishes come true, dreaming over and over of peace and healing for the war-wounded around the world, had the same impulse as Mr. Ahmad in Syria — to substitute clear blankness, the aftermath, with color.

Now, children around the world read Sadako’s story in a work of historical fiction and send paper cranes by the thousands to Hiroshima, to be draped near a statue of her in the peace park — linked together, a cacophony of bright origami birds with the thoughts, the fears, the hopes and futures of their makers finger-pressed into their sharp folds.

Real birds chattered around the park-like plaza that bright day I was there. Japanese schoolchildren in crisp ironed uniforms, let loose from the halls of the Peace Museum, skipped a bit and talked, their voices rising and falling like chittery wingbeats around the birds of peace. 

In the museum they had filed dutifully past the glass cases that honored their lost forebears, on what I surmised was an annual field trip. 

There was not much to show, only whatever was left over and somehow collected after the atomic blast.

Among the schooling throng of kids ebbing and flowing from room to room, I read each of the exhibit labels, their slightly-off English translations not stilted or convoluted but all the more poignant. 

So many years later, my memory of the exact text might be off, but its tone has stuck with me now for decades: “This is the lunchbox her mother sent with her to school that day. It was all that was found.” And then the next item, with a similar explanation. And the next.

I was the only gaijin, the only sore-thumb American in the crowd, wanting just to utter, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” But that would be ignoring the context of war, horrors committed by all.

“Death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” President Obama said in a speech while laying a wreath at the Hiroshima memorial in May. “A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.” The growth in nuclear weapons and other technologies, he said, “requires a moral revolution as well.”

Part of a carefully worded inscription in Japanese at the park invoking victims to rest in peace can be read as either “we” or “they shall not repeat the error.” 

There was nothing to be done during my visit but take it all in. There is nothing to be said. Whether circumstances seem to call for this or that atrocity in order to derail another, the consequences of decisions of war are inscribed irrevocably on one side or the other and on all their ensuing generations.

Until that day, as an American, I had never known in my bones of that kind of toll, which is dealt out so consistently and is so widespread around the world. 

I still don’t know it, even after meeting refugees last year who fled the Taliban or Assad in Syria, not even after seeing hundreds of travelers like Yusra Mardini, the newly minted Olympic swimmer, arriving on shore after harrowing trips.

To those Japanese students, too young perhaps to take in much more than the elegiac feel of the peace park, or Sadako’s story — though that’s enough — it’s a long-borne piece of their culture, as is, perhaps, the countenance of their grannies or their aunts, now sickly, dying out, deformed by radiation sickness. 

To the Syrians, to people the world over, it’s their set of circumstances, too.

They rise in the face of adversity, play music, swim. They prepare food so lovingly and set it in the sea adrift. They hold on to the lunchbox last held by a little girl gone, just gone, and go on.

The power of these things isn’t incendiary, but cumulative, like the pile of ever-renewed fragile paper cranes locking wings in a wash of soul-lifting color and strength. They lift us. They lift the world.

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.