Michael James Wong and the Desecration of Sadako Sasaki's Legacy
The fifth essay in the increasingly inaccurately named Crane Trilogy
by Marcus
Part 1: On the Shoulders of Giants
The crane has had it rough.
As the single most famous origami model, the crane appears today in all facets of life: art, politics, commerce, and more. Most folders can only dream of making one of their creations so ubiquitous. But the ubiquity of the crane has an inevitable consequence. Because it is so widespread, many of its uses have strayed from its original meaning. This is not inherently bad–the crane is capable of holding multiple meanings–but many know the crane only on a surface level, unaware why it is so famous at all.
Fame is obviously not the sole measure of an origami design’s worth, but the crane derives its popular appeal from a long, layered history. It has been reinterpreted and recontextualized in ways that no other origami model, even other traditional models, has been. The crane has passed through the hands of many people–most notably Sadako Sasaki–gaining multiple different symbolisms: an association with longevity, yet with children; a symbol of Japan, yet related to a terrible Japanese tragedy. Its value lies not in its intrinsic form but its extrinsic cultural context. It is safe to say that resentment towards the crane, surprisingly common among folders, comes from a failure to fully understand that context.
Over the last few years, I have sought a deeper understanding of the crane through a series of written works. In Everything is Awesome, I defended the crane from the complexity-obsessed folders who looked down on it. In Origami and Orientalism, I explored the crane’s replacement by the Flapping Bird under the thumb of Western colonialism in Asia. In Sunday in the Park with Sadako and Pacific Overtures, I came face to face with Sadako Sasaki herself, finding even the Japanese failed to truly understand the crane. Like I said: the crane has had it rough. After years of slights, memes, and overall dismissiveness, I’ve seen it all.
Or so I thought, until I encountered whatever the fuck was happening in Senbazuru: One Thousand Steps to Happiness, Fold by Fold. Michael James Wong’s meditation book has to take a record for the most shameless desecration of the crane and its symbolism yet. Everything that gives the crane power has been twisted into a barely recognizable mockery of itself in this book. Senbazuru spits in the face of the crane’s meaning and expects our praise for it.
“I would also ask that you do not treat this book as sacred,” writes Wong in the opening pages of Senbazuru; “it is not meant to be left unscathed.” Okay then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Part 2: A Return to Invented History
Throughout history, origami has seen many uses beyond pure art: an educational toy in Froebel’s kindergarten, a 19th-century Japanese conjuring trick, a tool for engineering solar panels. One distinct tendency my writings have not yet covered is the use of origami in mindfulness. Senbazuru provides a prime example of this trend. Michael James Wong frames the folding of the crane as a mindfulness exercise: a reminder to slow down, live in the moment, and be content. Sprinkled throughout are quasi-Japanese inkbrush paintings and inspirational quotes: “Do one thing at a time, not everything all at once.” “When climbing a mountain, stop often for the view.” “We must always set the table before we sit down to eat.”
The book is divided into twelve chapters, each themed around a positive mental attribute: courage, inspiration, resilience, gratitude. Throughout the book, Wong relates stories from his childhood and his career as a mindfulness teacher, as well as founder of the mindfulness organization Just Breathe. He gives pieces of calming, meditative advice, building a story along the way, interspersed with folding diagrams for the crane. Wong sells the origami crane as a symbol of “peace, hope, and healing,” a simple path to spiritual wellness and satisfaction with life.
This book would seem fairly innocuous. But I remind you: where does the senbazuru come from? Why exactly does the paper crane symbolize peace, hope, and healing? Wong mentions the “tradition” of the thousand cranes, but the crane’s association with peace is relatively new. It is of course derived from the life–and death–of Sadako Sasaki, who developed leukemia when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, dying at the age of twelve. Her folding of a thousand cranes on her deathbed became internationally famous, dramatized in books such as Eleanor Coerr’s Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. This greatly contributed to the crane’s preeminent status among origami models; in the Western world, it even managed to outpace the popularity of the Flapping Bird, long regarded as the “real” Japanese model.
Today, the crane (and the senbazuru especially) is inescapably tied to Sadako Sasaki. Yet Senbazuru only ever mentions her once–and not even in the text. Wong writes in the foreword that Senbazuru is “for Sadako, who inspired hope with a single fold.” It is appropriate, then, to return to Hiroshima to recall what Sadako really inspires. I have described Hiroshima in previous writing, but I mostly kept to the park. A piece remains unaccounted for: the Peace Memorial Museum, which holds the true power of the crane–and exactly what Wong ignores.
Within the dark corridors of the museum are graphic images of the bomb’s aftermath: women with kimono patterns burned onto their skin, emaciated children with blisters covering their entire faces. In a small glass box lie a dozen of Sadako Sasaki’s cranes, folded from tiny scraps of paper scrounged around the last hospital she ever stayed in. The cranes are not gentle or comforting. Hiroshima presents us with a cold, ugly truth: Sadako Sasaki was murdered. The famous senbazuru is the last gasp of a slowly dying child. The crane is a symbol of peace because it contains the worst horrors of war. It is a pleading, desperate hope that nobody will ever suffer the agony of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. Its healing wish is filled with cruel irony–it failed to save Sadako, its most iconic creator.
Cranes by Sadako Sasaki. Image credit: japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/g7-summit/20230520-110813/
So what kind of tasteless, tone-deaf joke reduces the crane to “a path to true happiness?” The disconnect between Wong’s book and the reality of the crane is so vast it is laughable. He mentions none of the horror Sadako endured while making them, nor the activists who later told her story. His vague, pleasant niceties contribute nothing meaningful to the crane’s story. Senbazuru claims to be for Sadako, but it ignores all the lessons she left us. It bastardizes the peace movement’s language: “peace” achieved just by meditating for a few minutes, “hope” with zero urgency or call to action.
The crane’s power is inherently tied to Sadako and Hiroshima. It requires facing the tragedy of her story and learning from it. When this is not done, the crane is removed from its context and becomes another soulless, sterile object. Any use of the crane that does not acknowledge this all-important context is thoroughly insulting. If folders want origami to be considered art, how have they allowed Michael James Wong’s Senbazuru to exist unquestioned? The “gentle wisdoms” and “universal truths” belie a profound philosophical cowardice. His book proves he is unequipped to comprehend the origami crane. Let Senbazuru be seen for what it is: an embarrassing, out-of-touch failure, a desecration of Sadako Sasaki’s legacy.
Part 3: McMindfulness
I do not mean to attack Michael James Wong as an individual, nor to get him “canceled.” Not out of the kindness of my heart–it would simply be ineffective without addressing the systemic issues at play. Senbazuru ignores the politics of the senbazuru because mindfulness itself refuses to engage with politics. This phenomenon is detailed by Ronald Purser in his book McMindfulness. The central conceit of mindfulness is that focus and meditation can alleviate negative stresses in life, which lie largely in our own heads. But this ignores that stress has political causes: rising wealth inequality, a failing social safety net, the erosion of leisure time. Thus, neoliberal capitalism uses mindfulness to distract people from the structural causes of stress, persuading them to merely be more effective within the system.
“Anything that offers success in our unjust world without trying to change it is not revolutionary–it just helps people cope,” Purser explains. “However, it could also be making things worse.” Internalizing suffering discourages people from changing institutions or policies which might improve their lives; one only needs to mindfully adapt to capitalism better than everyone else. Corporations have exploited mindfulness to discipline their workers in stressful environments: Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” program is described as an “organizational WD-40, a necessary lubricant between driven, ambitious employees and Google’s demanding corporate culture.” Mindfulness frequently bills itself as a “radical” or “revolutionary” practice. The truth is precisely the opposite.
Mindfulness has proven successful on the market: it is now a 4-billion-dollar industry with celebrity endorsements, school and business courses, and a slew of apps and programs. But when selling itself, mindfulness is trapped by a peculiar contradiction: it must be universal, which requires distancing itself from Buddhist spirituality as a science-backed, secular practice. Yet it must also have cultural authenticity, and so it will appropriate the imagery of Asian culture in a form of gross Orientalism. (That its leaders are occasionally Asian, like Michael James Wong, does not change this.) A 2014 special on 60 Minutes once interviewed Jon Kabat-Zinn, often considered the founder of modern mindfulness. Purser notes the shallow, surface-level Asian-ness of Kabat-Zinn’s promotion:
“…no mention was made of the ‘B’ word. However, the camera zoomed in on Kabat-Zinn, who sat cross-legged on a zafu cushion in a meditative posture, ringing a Tibetan cymbal, and holding his hands in religious mudra gestures. These traditional Buddhist artifacts were on display to convey authenticity, but the science of mindfulness had somehow captured the essence of the dharma, so the need to talk about it vanished.”
If mindfulness sells itself using Asian aesthetics, it should come as little surprise that mindfulness finds much to like about origami and has appropriated it for its own ends.
The tenets of McMindfulness crop up throughout Senbazuru, such as the section “Suffering is a Choice We Need Not Choose.” Wong lays out his belief that all suffering is a decision that we make: “We choose to be a victim and we choose to prolong the story. In all cases of suffering, we give it permission to exist.” All we need is to flip a switch in our brains and stop believing in suffering! Wong seems to believe people choose to suffer, “because it allows us to disperse ownership of our traumas and sadness, to find something or someone to blame.” This idea is deeply rooted in neoliberalism–recall Margaret Thatcher’s quote that “there is no such thing as society.” What he pooh-poohs as “blame” one might instead frame as accountability: Wong asks us, incredulously, not to hold social systems accountable for causing harm, taking that burden entirely onto ourselves.
Internalization is demonstrated again in the section “Do Not Blame the Mountain.” Wong says to “face the mountain”–a hackneyed metaphor for obstacles in life–one must give up blaming external forces for one’s troubles and take responsibility for self-improvement. “So do not blame the mountain/For it is you who must rise today.” But the mountain is not an inert object. Capitalism is an economic system created by humans (and, lest we forget, that can be abolished by humans). Analogizing systems to something permanent like a mountain blinds us to the power we actually have over our surroundings, and that organized, collective effort can change them.
In accordance with neoliberal values, Purser notes that McMindfulness is sold in astonishingly selfish, individualistic ways: “I want to reduce my stress. I want to enhance my concentration. I want to improve my productivity and performance. One invests in mindfulness as one would invest in a stock hoping to receive a handsome dividend.” Of Senbazuru’s twelve chapter values, all but one are framed in self-centered ways. (The exception, “Support,” we will return to later.) Courage is valuable because I will be rewarded for it. Resilience is valuable because I will obtain my goals. If I fold cranes, my “dedication will always be rewarded with joy,” because joy is something I deserve. What Purser calls the “Western sense of entitlement to happiness” goes unquestioned: personal happiness is the be-all-end-all of Senbazuru, and worthier goals simply do not exist.
Wong occasionally veers close to criticizing capitalism, but always in nonspecific, politically inoffensive terms. He presents mindfulness as an antidote to the “busyness” of modern life. But who insists that our lives always be busy and that not working is a sign of moral failure? He criticizes the world’s “constructed realities and curative fantasies,” but who designs the social media environment that manipulates us with those things? He constantly names the symptoms of capitalism without extrapolating back to their roots in social structures.
Mindfulness can provide some benefits to us, as Purser concedes: “Tuning out mental rumination does help reduce stress, as well as chronic anxiety and other maladies. Becoming more aware of automatic reactions can make people calmer and potentially kinder.” But these must come with major caveats. Buddhism distinguishes between “right mindfulness” and “wrong mindfulness” for a reason: mindfulness on its own contains no ethical guidelines. Buddhism, in addition to mindfulness, preaches against greed and egoism, and for reducing suffering among all sentient beings, not just oneself. These additional teachings are conveniently ignored by Western mindfulness gurus, who are selling a product first and foremost.
Detached from a moral framework, mindfulness can be appropriated by any ideology, even serving explicitly violent ends. Elliot Sang, a YouTuber, community organizer, and practicing Buddhist, warns that “If a fascist meditates, they’ll come to peace with their thoughts about eugenics.” The US military has invested in mindfulness programs to make its soldiers more effective shooters in an effort to “optimize warrior performance.” The Norwegian neo-Nazi and mass murderer Anders Breivik likened himself to a samurai, meditating to calm his mind before massacring his victims. In WWII, the Imperial Japanese military justified killing its enemies with distorted Buddhist philosophies: “Warped interpretations of ideas such as ‘emptiness’ (ku) and ‘no mind’ (mu) fed a non-dual theory that acts of killing had no karmic effect.”
Marching Imperial Japanese soldiers, no doubt trained to be calm, mindful killers. Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism
Obviously, these represent somewhat extreme cases. But it is wishful
thinking to expect being mindful and staying in the present moment to
magically make us better people. At minimum, origami artists should
acknowledge the dark side of mindfulness and prevent origami from being used
for violent ends. Ultimately, they should critique mindfulness itself as a
tool of neoliberal capitalism, an economic structure predicated on violence,
and reject its influence altogether. This is easier said than done:
mindfulness has deep roots in origami and has already taken hold of much of
the community’s imagination.
Part 4: You’re Not Good, You’re Not Bad, You’re Just Nice
In a talk at the 2026 Conference for Creators, origami artist Beth Johnson asks: why aren’t more folders political activists? While artists in many mediums have embedded political themes in their work, relatively few of these can be found in origami. Johnson postulates some explanations: a desire to avoid fracturing the community with divisive issues, a focus on precision of form over creating external meaning, an inherent difficulty in storytelling due to the limitations the origami medium. Frequently mentioned in her talk is “the bubble” surrounding origami: the tendency for folders to turn inwards and avoid engaging with the outside world, including its politics.
I would like to expand on a topic that Johnson only briefly touches on: the influence of mindfulness. Wong’s Senbazuru is one of many origami-based mindfulness books. “Colouring is out; origami is in,” proclaims a 2016 article in The Telegraph: a “rush of titles” are now selling origami as a mindfulness activity, advertising its benefits for concentration, focus, and calm. Books like Colour-Gami: Colour and Fold Your Way to Calm and The Book of Mindful Origami: Fold Paper, Unfold Your Mind have exploded onto the scene in the last decade alone. Its roots are even older: the 1991 Conference for Origami in Education and Therapy explored the therapeutic potential of origami, foreshadowing the language of mindfulness. Folder and papercraft artist Elsje van der Ploeg wrote that origami “can connect your inside and outside world and can tell you what you want to know about yourself. It can bring order to your mind, you can make space in your head by paper folding.”
Mindfulness books, mostly containing simple models, often feature the crane, with a few paragraphs on Sadako Sasaki. Their statements are invariably empty. As an example, take The Art of Mindful Origami by Dr. Richard Chambers. The book repeats the usual story of Sadako’s life and death in the chapter on the crane. But he stops just short of considering its political implications. He makes references to the crane as a generalized symbol of “healing,” a nice if non-specific message. But what caused the sickness Sadako so desperately wanted to heal from? Might the crane have anything to say about the American war machine, which crushed Sadako’s future under its boot and does the same, to other children, in other countries, to this day? The Art of Mindful Origami skips right past this.
More atrociously, John Morin and Camilla Sanderson’s Inspired Origami tries to rewrite Sadako’s story as a mindfulness lesson. “Sadako folded origami paper cranes, which kept her awareness and attention in the present moment,” writes the book. “This echoes an old Zen proverb that says to keep death on your shoulder to help you stay in the present moment, which is the essence of mindfulness–to keep our awareness in the here and now.” NO! That is not the point of that story! Sadako did not inexplicably die–she was killed, by a military force which still exists and can still be held accountable. Every appearance of the origami crane in a book is a chance to make a political statement. Failure to do so, like Michael James Wong and countless other McMindfulness gurus, desecrates Sadako’s legacy and the movement which built it.
We folders cannot dismiss these books as a fringe movement. The mindfulness trend has seemingly been embraced by the origami community: several major folders have attached their names to mindfulness books, likely to capitalize on a new audience. The late Mark Bolitho, a notable British folder, penned several such works like Perfectly Mindful Origami: Origami Paper Boxes. John Montroll makes his own contribution in Meditative Origami, while Maria Sinayskaya’s Zen Origami features many of her iconic modulars. Even a paperfolding activist like Sue DiCicco of the Peace Crane Project frames her goals in mindfulness terms: “We fold not because paper can solve the world’s problems. We fold because the act itself teaches patience. Care. Intention…. In a world that often feels loud and fractured, folding is quiet.”
So much folding discourse asks how to do origami–Robert Lang states that his most commonly asked question is “How do you come up with your designs?” So little of it asks why, a gap which McMindfulness can exploit. The truth is that for many people, origami functions simply as a mindfulness practice. “The world fades away and you just focus on your fingers and the paper,” says origami author Nick Robinson. But the individualist outlook of mindfulness, and its valuing of calm and stillness over action, has detrimental consequences. Bringing the outside world and its politics into origami is near-universally rejected.
In Beth Johnson’s own talk, multiple guests reacted negatively to the prospect of political origami, calling activist folders like Joseph Wu “extremely rude” or “too passionate.” Origami folders defend their precious bubble as a source of peace and harmony, and view activism as a disruption to that harmony. Ronald Purser recalls his critiques being similarly rejected by mindfulness teachers: “Are you going to do anything other than be a crank?” “Well, what is it that you want us to do differently? What solutions do you have for us?” Mindfulness detaches us from a systemic understanding of the world and treats it as freedom, shutting down political critiques as “too negative.”
By Kasia Babis. Image credit: https://thenib.com/centrist-history/
Whether mindfulness was initially attracted to origami because of its
insularity, or origami’s insularity was caused by mindfulness, is something
of a chicken-and-egg question. But the result is the same either way. The
origami community is afraid to make political demands, trapped by a fragile
illusion of neutrality. And an entire avenue of artistic opportunity has
been closed off as a result. Many view the crane as highly symbolic, but too
commonplace to be meaningful as art–ignoring that the crane is commonplace
precisely because it is highly symbolic, and an active political
movement has created that symbolism and spread it worldwide.
I think we should disagree with one another. I think we should prioritize things beyond our individual happiness. I think this will allow origami to grow and improve. One would hope the origami world can find the courage to reach these conclusions on its own. But I will not sit down and wait patiently for that to happen. The values of McMindfulness are not the values of art–we are at a crossroads, and it grows ever more urgent for us to take the right side.
Intermezzo: Crossing the Divide
If one part of Senbazuru is worth appreciating, it is the chapter “Support,” which actually discusses communal solidarity. In a section titled “The Invisible Army,” Michael James Wong relates a story where he and his partner had their house broken into and their personal belongings stolen. In the days afterward, friends and neighbors gathered to check in, send supporting messages and gifts, and even stand guard outside the house. In this one chapter, mindfulness stops being about “I, me and mine” and takes on a social significance. Wong comes closest to breaking out of the neoliberal individualism that otherwise pervades Senbazuru.
Wong understands that “fundamentally, we are creatures of community,” and that a supportive environment is a necessary component of our well-being. But community cannot be merely a coping mechanism. It is pointless to treat one’s community as a reprieve just to go back and more effectively toil one’s life away for the capitalist machine. Our only path to lasting well-being is a radical community–which empowers us to transform our surroundings through direct action rather than tacitly accept them, which is precious not for being rare but universal.
Connected cranes, by Linda Mihara. Can folders be connected in the same way? Image credit: https://origamihara.com/renzuru
I would like the origami community to be such a radical community.
Unfortunately, most folders I know would rather keep origami away from
“controversial” topics like war, oppression, and genocide. But identifying
as apolitical is taking a side: the side of power and privilege. The
injustices of the world can be ignored (for a time) by hiding in a social
bubble. They cannot be solved. I invite my fellow folders to step beyond the
edge of the bubble; to try crossing the divide, so to speak. Our
connections give us power; our unified demands can make us a movement. We
folders can ignore this power to our detriment or act on it.
Part 5: An Ultimatum
Beneath the entire Crane Trilogy (all five entries) runs a fundamental unifying question, perhaps the only significant question origami faces: How should origami make us feel? All other questions–whether origami should be simple or complex, abstract or realistic, replicable or unique, follow the conventions of purity or break them–are trivial aesthetic choices in servitude to the fundamental question. The feelings can be simple or complex, bold or subtle; the “us” can be ourselves, other folders, or non-folders; but this question must be any self-proclaimed origami artist’s first and highest priority.
It is frustrating, then, that most answers to the fundamental question have been so empty. A lot of modern origami artists try to impress others with flashy, substance-less virtuosity, appealing to the lowest common denominator with empty spectacle. This is an understandable reaction to a previous trend in origami, a predominance of childlike simplicity, but these are two halves of the same coin. Neither one allows origami to be seen as the fully human experience it is. Orientalism has so thoroughly denied origami its humanity that even folders themselves have internalized it. This trains folders not to express genuine feelings with origami, which further trains audiences not to look for them, trapping origami in a vicious cycle.
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| Image by the author. |
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