Sunday in the Park with Sadako
A folder’s pilgrimage to Hiroshima
by Marcus
George
is afraid
George
sees the park
George
sees it dying
George
too may fade
Leaving
no mark
Just
passing through
Just
like the people out
strolling on Sunday…
“Lesson #8,” Sunday in the Park with George
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 picture. The story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl who made a thousand cranes before she died, 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 16th 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 gave rise to modern origami. Lots of people still haven’t heard of Yoshizawa–but everyone knows the crane.
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| The Children's Peace Memorial. Image credit: https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3400.html |
I first learned origami as a child from my mother, who in turn learned it from her grandmother. She most likely learned origami at 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–are they allowed to matter here, in the shadow of the atom bomb? Is it right to even ask that question in the first place?
I mean, I know the answer. They are, and it has to be. One cannot forget that thousands of victims of the atom bomb were from Korea, forcibly recruited as conscript laborers during the war effort. In the immediate aftermath, some blamed Korean survivors for the bombing; in the years afterwards, their experiences were largely written out of history. Only decades later did the Japanese government even start to acknowledge their existence. The loudspeaker, obviously, had nothing to say about them. Japanese nationalists don’t actually respect Hiroshima; they exploit it, kind of like Israelis exploit the Holocaust. The only lesson they learn from it is “let’s be the colonizers the next time around.” And that's such an embarrassing thing to do with the memory of Sadako. She deserves so much better than that.
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? How can I fold anything that even comes close to Sadako? The hard truth is that I cannot. The crane carries with it empires and bombs and centuries more history. Thanks to Tsuru for Solidarity, the crane even means “Abolish ICE” now. I’ve seen cranes show up on random street murals that have nothing to do with origami. To imply I could be in the same league as that is a cruel joke. 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 there is more than enough irreverence. Tourists, Japanese and foreign alike, visit the park and take pictures on their phones 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 now been years since I left the Hiroshima Peace Park. By the time you read this, those two cranes are certainly no longer there. They are small; their color has faded, they are easily blown away, swept up and discarded. I would, of course, expect nothing less of them.
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