Mayors for Peace is an international movement working towards peace and nuclear disarmament. Manchester is a Vice-Presidential city, one of around 8,500 member cities, and is hosting the Mayors for Peace Executive Conference this month.
The posters below come from the Sadako and Paper Cranes exhibition produced by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and are also temporarily on display in Manchester Museum’s Living Worlds gallery to mark the event. You can also download the full story in PDF format but this comes with a strong content warning as it contains pictures and text depicting death and the effects of nuclear weapons.
They tell the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who died from radiation exposure linked to the atomic bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Sadako was born in January 1943 – two years before the bombing – and survived the blast in August 1945.
She became unwell in her last year of elementary school and was treated for leukaemia at the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital during 1955.
Schoolchildren sent multicoloured paper cranes as get well messages for the patients. This inspired Sadako to begin folding her own paper cranes with the hope that she would get better. She folded over 1000.
In Japan, there is a belief that a person folding 1000 paper cranes will have their wish granted – Sadako’s wish was to live. However, her condition kept on deteriorating, and she died on the 25th of October 1955 when she was only 12 years old.
A Children’s Peace Monument was unveiled in 1958 in memory of Sadako and other children who died in the atomic bombing. Countless paper cranes are still sent there from all over the world.
If you’d like to explore this topic further, visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which conveys the horrors of nuclear weapons through its collections and exhibitions with great humanity.
