The story says Sadako Sasaki was only two years old on Aug. 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Sasaki began to show symptoms of leukemia, was admitted to the hospital shortly afterward and passed away at the age of 12. Folklore says that a crane can live for a thousand years and a person who folds an origami crane will have their wish granted. Every day, until her very last day, Sasaki folded cranes, 1,300 to be exact. Now the cranes symbolize the peace that she wished for.
“A lot of uncertainties are going on in the world,” Akiko Praylow, Japanese outreach coordinator at Marshall University, said. “I thought about what I as a Japanese can do. The things we can do to the world might be small, but what is important is to take an action. This project is open for everyone in the community. You do not need to know how to fold an origami crane. We can always learn together.”
The Japanese Outreach program at Marshall University, housed in the Marshall University Research Corporation, will display origami cranes at the museum throughout the spring. Praylow started folding the cranes with the hope of illustrating peace. She and Marshall students made many of the cranes at Marshall’s International Festival last year and others were made by the community at the Clay Center in Charleston during an origami workshop in February.
The number of cranes continued to grow when Japanese families from the West Virginia International School got involved. The number reached into the thousands, thus the name of the project, “Thousands of Origami Cranes.” The cranes will be part of the exhibit, “E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation Presents East to West: Japanese Prints from the Burkart Collection.”
For more information on Museum of Art hours when the exhibition can be viewed, visit hmoa.org. For more information about the Japanese Outreach Program or the virtual classrooms, Praylow can be reached at akiko.praylow@marshall.edu.