Sunday in the Park with Sadako

A folder’s pilgrimage to Hiroshima

by Marcus

 

The first thing that hits you when you enter Hiroshima is the sheer mundanity of the place. From the train station alone, you get all the usual Japanese things: the saccharine music playing over the speakers, the identical white shirts and black pants and work bags of bustling salarymen, the shops in neat, orderly glass cubes selling bento boxes or coffee or jewelry. Sometimes there’s a baseball game, and everyone is wearing red Hiroshima Carp uniforms and chattering excitedly. The feeling is uncanny; after a couple hours, you adjust to the atmosphere, bathe in the relaxed energy of the citizens, and almost forget about the atom bomb. That is, until you get to the dome.

 

On August 6, 1945, the uranium bomb known as Little Boy was dropped directly over the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. Everyone inside was killed instantly, but much of the hall’s sturdy structure remained intact, including its distinctive dome. Over time, as Hiroshima was rebuilt, the few surviving buildings from before the bombing were taken down, one by one, until just this dome remained. This is the one place in the city where the raw energy of the bomb is contained, a twisted shrine made from rusted iron and cracked stone. It is the spiritual opposite of a nuclear bomb, taking the energy released in the destruction of a city and focusing it all into one point. The effect is silencing; one can hardly hear a single human word from the visitors that gaze upon the dome, taking in the utter devastation. Only the incessant buzzing of the cicadas can be heard–and if they could truly understand the meaning of this place, they might fall silent too.

 

It is here that origami enters the story. The story of Sadako Sasaki, the atomic bomb victim who made a thousand cranes, is known to many, and part of the Peace Memorial is specifically dedicated to her. Around a statue of a girl with an orizuru, large clear boxes hold thousands upon thousands of cranes, donated by schools across Japan and beyond. The origami crane has long been a symbol of Japan, appearing in Japanese art as early as the 16^th century. With Sadako’s story launched to international fame, it gained layers of new meaning; it came to represent children, hope, world peace. Today, when most people think of origami, the crane is the first thing that comes to mind, and that is in no small part due to Sadako. Perhaps it is she, not Yoshizawa, who birthed modern origami. Lots of people still haven’t heard of Yoshizawa–but everyone knows the crane.

 

I first learned origami as a child from my mother, who in turn had learned it from her grandmother. She most likely learned going to school in Taiwan under the Imperial Japanese occupation. Sadako and I mirror each other in a weird way, then. My connection to origami came with the birth of an empire; the world’s connection to origami came with the fall of that very same empire. The day I visited the Peace Park, a loudspeaker just outside was blaring Japanese nationalist propaganda, calling for the restoration of the Japanese military and praising the old empire. Its placement was certainly not accidental. The innumerable war crimes committed by the Japanese themselves in China and Korea–is it possible to bring them up here, in the shadow of the atom bomb? Is it right to even ask that question in the first place?

 

Sadako never had to ponder these questions. She died at twelve, her bones and blood riddled with leukemia. She could not have fully grasped the complex, interweaving systems making up war and empire. Nor could she ever conceive of the impact of her own origami, or the ways in which it might tie into those things. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has built thousands of bombs, each hundreds of times more powerful. The nuclear annihilation of all humankind became such a commonly accepted idea that people wrote jokes about it (see Tom Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go”). Against that terrible fate stands the humble crane, which is funny in its own way. A decades-old movement opposing nuclear weapons has taken an origami model as its symbol. Will it succeed in its goal? Perhaps it is too optimistic, but I think so. Maybe someday there will be a world without the bomb, and then we will look on the crane with even more reverence.

 

In a previous essay, Everything is Awesome, I decried the omnipresence of empty showpieces in origami, and looked to the thousand cranes as an answer. I vowed to make origami that achieved that level of meaning, or at least aspired towards it. But standing in Hiroshima, in the center of all of this, how can I? What can I fold that even comes close to the significance of Sadako? The hard truth is that I cannot. I cannot make origami that carries empires and bombs and hundreds more years of history with it. Here, in the city of the bomb, all other things are made meaningless.

 

I am not a particularly reverent person (just look at my Yoshizawa essays). But in Hiroshima, I think there is enough irreverence. Tourists, Japanese and foreign alike, visit the park and take pictures like any other tourist attraction. The street bordering the park hosts rows of souvenir shops and department stores–even the atom bomb, apparently, can be commercialized. So I merely submit myself. I do not–and will never–have the patience for a thousand cranes, but I can give two. One black, one white. Sadako and I, years and worlds apart.

 

It has been a couple days since I left the Hiroshima Peace Park. By the time this blog post goes up, they may not even be there anymore. The sun has faded them; the wind has likely carried them away. That is, of course, the entire point.