Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2003
Sadako Sasaki was two years old when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, near the end of World War II. Ten years later, she developed leukemia from radiation aftereffects. While in the hospital fighting for her life, she began folding cranes out of medicine wrapping paper, believing the cranes would cure her. She produced more than 1,000 cranes before she died in October 1955.
With some artistic guidance from three of Lawrence’s visiting students from Tokyo’s Waseda University and the collective effort of nearly 200 students from Appleton’s Edison Elementary School, a Lawrence contingent of faculty and students upheld a long-standing tradition in March by delivering 1,000 paper cranes to the Children’s Peace Monument, which is also known as the Tower of the Paper Cranes. Visitors from around the world bring paper cranes to the monument by the thousands as a tribute to Sasaki’s spirit.
The visit to the Tower in Peace Memorial Park was part of a ten-day environmental studies-focused Freeman Grant-funded trip that took 12 Lawrence students, ten faculty members, and two Appleton-area schoolteachers, including Connie Betzer Roop, ’73, to Japan and China during spring break.
Peter Peregrine, associate professor of anthropology and one of the trip’s faculty leaders, found the Peace Park “tremendously powerful.”
“They humanize the entire experience so that it’s not remote in time and space,” he says. “The display of cranes makes it very tangible to see the outpouring of support for all the children who died of radiation exposure.” rp