the tall blond guy goes to japan

Where do the cranes go?

Hiroshima Children's Monument

About 1/8 of all the cranes in the area

Back in elementary school, when I should have been learning how to spell, I remember a unit on Hiroshima. As a class project, we all learned how to make paper cranes out of origami paper. A little girl named Sasaki contracted lukemia from the bomb blast, and got it into her head that if she folder one thousand paper cranes, she would be cured of the disease and be able to carry on with her life. Unfortunately, she died before she could reach her goal. Word of this got out, and people from all over Japan were folding paper cranes and sending them to Hiroshima. Soon, the entire world learned of the story, and people have been folding and sending ever since.

Crane closeup

Looking around at all the cranes- there must be over a million here. Sent from all over the world, New Zealand, Germany, South Africa, Canada and of course Japan. Some came with poems...

One, from a person in Australia, was a story of how she was here two years ago and resolved at the time to fold a thousand cranes of her own. She returned and delivered the cranes to the Children's Monument when she had finished.