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J.G. Keely's Reviews > Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
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by
J.G. Keely's review
bookshelves: childhood, contemporary-fiction, reviewed, america, asia
May 28, 2008
bookshelves: childhood, contemporary-fiction, reviewed, america, asia
They had us make our own cranes when we read this during middle school. I was new to origami, but it only took a couple of minutes to make the crane. I suddenly wondered how long it would take to make a thousand. At two minutes a crane, sitting in bed and doing it for, say, eight out of my sixteen waking hours, I'd be done in less than a week.
This seemed funny to me, until I read that the real Sadako did finish her thousand cranes in less then a month, and kept on folding more. But since the book posits that her wish was to stay alive, perhaps the author thought that to have her reach her goal and still die would be too sad. Or perhaps the author recognized that, without the dream of that wish, there would be no real story to tell.
I find this disappointing, as the author could have said something more meaningful if Sadako had finished them, but still died: that no one can stand against their own death, but even as we face our own, we may fight for something greater, we may try to fight against a world of senseless death.
Are we afraid to tell our children it is a fight we can never win? Does that make it less worth fighting? Wouldn't it be better for them to learn that now, from someone they trust, rather than to discover it later, when they are already in the middle of the confusions of life? What could be more disheartening than suddenly having that dream snatched away?
It is a difficult question: how to breach, for our children, the concepts of death, of war, of hope, and of the inescapable. When we scale it down, to one person, to one pain, that is when we feel it the most. But when we do this, we miss out on all that surrounds it. By concentrating on one person, you can turn a mutual war into a directed crime, and there lies the danger.
It is not uplifting to see a little girl die slowly, of something she cannot understand, to have her promise of a life revoked, but this is not all there is to the matter. As human beings, it is easy for us to look at the suffering of a few, especially a spectacular suffering: nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, 9/11, and feel enraged.
And it should upset us. War is unequal, unfair, and makes a mockery of beauty, art, and humanity. But it is always too easy for us to forget the other side.
So many people react to this book with sorrow for the little girl, with a sense that the nuclear weapons were a tragedy, unnecessary, and inhumane. But that is simply ignoring the larger story.
Where are the books about all the children the Japanese soldiers killed? Even without nuclear weapons, the Japanese practiced total war, which meant hundreds of thousands of civilians dying every month. They slaughtered children, they took slaves and worked them to death in mines.
They used biological weapons on Chinese citizens and killed others in nightmarish testing facilities where Japanese scientists observed the effects of poisons, chemicals, and disease on their hapless test subjects.
They started the war because they were nationalists and wanted to expand, to destroy their neighbors, and to conquer the world. They refused to accept that losing was an option, and were willing to die to win.
If the Allies attacked Japan itself, the Japanese planned to recruit every man, woman, and child during the final invasion, to blow up American tanks with bombs strapped to fifteen year-old boys. Even after the first atomic bomb was dropped, the Japanese command—including the Emporor—rallied to continue the war, even passing off the bombing itself as an industrial accident.
It is important to recognize the suffering of others, but it seems we too often concentrate on the suffering of one person over another. It is easier for us to concentrate this way, to see something spectacular and terrifying like the 2,752 deaths of 9/11, and ignore the 1,311,969 Iraqis dead since. Or look at the death of Jews in the Holocaust and ignore the Poles, Romany, Atheists, and Homosexuals who died alongside them
I sometimes fear that by hiding from children how commonplace death really is, we do not allow them to think about death except for isolated, melodramatic stories. If we cannot learn confront death except when it spectacular, then we will never really try to stop it, because we will only focus on the rare cases, and fail to notice that death is no less final from untreated disease as from a gun.
Perhaps I am silly to expect more of children's books than I do of adult books, but then, I've found I can expect more from children than from adults. I am of the opinion that the best way to prevent children and adolescents from having early pregnancies is by giving them all the difficult, unpleasant details. I think the same goes for war. This doesn't mean showing them footage of either act, but an open, honest sit-down beats dramatized, nationalistic propaganda any day of the week.
This seemed funny to me, until I read that the real Sadako did finish her thousand cranes in less then a month, and kept on folding more. But since the book posits that her wish was to stay alive, perhaps the author thought that to have her reach her goal and still die would be too sad. Or perhaps the author recognized that, without the dream of that wish, there would be no real story to tell.
I find this disappointing, as the author could have said something more meaningful if Sadako had finished them, but still died: that no one can stand against their own death, but even as we face our own, we may fight for something greater, we may try to fight against a world of senseless death.
Are we afraid to tell our children it is a fight we can never win? Does that make it less worth fighting? Wouldn't it be better for them to learn that now, from someone they trust, rather than to discover it later, when they are already in the middle of the confusions of life? What could be more disheartening than suddenly having that dream snatched away?
It is a difficult question: how to breach, for our children, the concepts of death, of war, of hope, and of the inescapable. When we scale it down, to one person, to one pain, that is when we feel it the most. But when we do this, we miss out on all that surrounds it. By concentrating on one person, you can turn a mutual war into a directed crime, and there lies the danger.
It is not uplifting to see a little girl die slowly, of something she cannot understand, to have her promise of a life revoked, but this is not all there is to the matter. As human beings, it is easy for us to look at the suffering of a few, especially a spectacular suffering: nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, 9/11, and feel enraged.
And it should upset us. War is unequal, unfair, and makes a mockery of beauty, art, and humanity. But it is always too easy for us to forget the other side.
So many people react to this book with sorrow for the little girl, with a sense that the nuclear weapons were a tragedy, unnecessary, and inhumane. But that is simply ignoring the larger story.
Where are the books about all the children the Japanese soldiers killed? Even without nuclear weapons, the Japanese practiced total war, which meant hundreds of thousands of civilians dying every month. They slaughtered children, they took slaves and worked them to death in mines.
They used biological weapons on Chinese citizens and killed others in nightmarish testing facilities where Japanese scientists observed the effects of poisons, chemicals, and disease on their hapless test subjects.
They started the war because they were nationalists and wanted to expand, to destroy their neighbors, and to conquer the world. They refused to accept that losing was an option, and were willing to die to win.
If the Allies attacked Japan itself, the Japanese planned to recruit every man, woman, and child during the final invasion, to blow up American tanks with bombs strapped to fifteen year-old boys. Even after the first atomic bomb was dropped, the Japanese command—including the Emporor—rallied to continue the war, even passing off the bombing itself as an industrial accident.
It is important to recognize the suffering of others, but it seems we too often concentrate on the suffering of one person over another. It is easier for us to concentrate this way, to see something spectacular and terrifying like the 2,752 deaths of 9/11, and ignore the 1,311,969 Iraqis dead since. Or look at the death of Jews in the Holocaust and ignore the Poles, Romany, Atheists, and Homosexuals who died alongside them
I sometimes fear that by hiding from children how commonplace death really is, we do not allow them to think about death except for isolated, melodramatic stories. If we cannot learn confront death except when it spectacular, then we will never really try to stop it, because we will only focus on the rare cases, and fail to notice that death is no less final from untreated disease as from a gun.
Perhaps I am silly to expect more of children's books than I do of adult books, but then, I've found I can expect more from children than from adults. I am of the opinion that the best way to prevent children and adolescents from having early pregnancies is by giving them all the difficult, unpleasant details. I think the same goes for war. This doesn't mean showing them footage of either act, but an open, honest sit-down beats dramatized, nationalistic propaganda any day of the week.
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
May 28, 2008
– Shelved as:
childhood
May 28, 2008
– Shelved
May 28, 2008
– Shelved as:
contemporary-fiction
June 9, 2009
– Shelved as:
reviewed
September 4, 2010
– Shelved as:
america
September 4, 2010
– Shelved as:
asia
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I wrote a review of Sadako, The Giver, The Road, and The Bible on a website on the internet. My judgment told me to critique them. I critiqued their premises. I critiqued their plots. I critiqued their single-minded visions. I critiqued their grammatical structures. Then posters added flame wars to it. They flamed my critiques. They made ad hominem attacks. They told me to read the books again but have a different opinion this time. It gave me the idea to tell a story about the website. About how it was full of flames and everyone screamed an ran.The comment about Sadako got me stuck on commentators. There are commentators with no friends and no books who make comments. There are commentators who start flame wars and commentators who write prose poems and commentators who say "that's interesting, here's what I think . . .". I was stuck on 'The Road' a year ago. I have been begging people to provide textual support. I'm also stuck on The Giver. Middle school teachers say critiquing The Giver is the same as defending Fascism. The Giver isn't a great book and Fascism isn't a book at all. Fascism has nothing to do with Sadako. My most favorite book website is Goodreads because that's where my reviews and commentators live.
Wow. Your review really moved me. Thanks.
I'm glad you found something in it. Thanks for reading.
Great review. I wonder also about this approach in books and films (concentrating on one sympathetic character rather than the entire situation) and how it encourages an emotive response rather than rational consideration. I'd like to think this isn't what we want to teach children -- but then I remember reading this in elementary school and getting scolded by the teacher for not having the "right" emotional response.
It is in the individual that we see the tragedy of all war. As a pacifist, I find destruction and inhumanity as the ultimate end to injustice a sad and impossible solution. As your response suggests, the loss is too great. How do we justify the death of even one child to a greater cause. There must be better ways as shown by Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez (just to name a popular few).
I think when you look at the suffering of one individual, it becomes easy to hide the tragedies of war, like this book, where the concentration on the death of one child hides the fact that Japan was killing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in China and Southeast Asia every month, and those are just the civilians.Radiation fallout deaths like Sadako's were an unexpected result of nuclear weapons which the scientists who created them did not predict. In this sense, her death was an accident, not intended collateral by the US.
Concentrating on her death and suffering to the exclusion of all else doesn't tell the tragedy of war, it simplifies war into a mere human interest story. This case is especially grievous, because the author changes the facts of Sadako's story to maximize the emotional impact.
That's not reporting the tragedy of war, that's political propaganda trying to minimize the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of deaths by concentrating on just one.
Justifying one death for a greater cause isn't that difficult once we realize that peaceful demonstrations are a privilege, not a right. If the US had peacefully demonstrated against the attacks of Japan and Germany, how well do you think we would have fared?
It only took one violent man to kill Martin Luther King, and once he was dead, his political opponents completely rewrote his message. Now he's remembered as a civil rights leader fighting for equality for black people even though he spent the last years of his life saying that race was unimportant and that the real revolution we needed was a socialist revolution to uplift the poor.
That's the problem with pacifism, unless there is a superstructure keeping you safe from reprisal, all it takes is one person willing to use force to take your life and end your peaceful voice.
It's unfortunate, but it often only takes one person to ruin things for everything else. Pacifism is a great ideal to fight for, but ideals must be tempered with a realistic view or they become mere well-wishing.
Haven't read the book, but excellent commentary.Pacifism is as violence does. I wonder how far Gandhi would've gotten with the Nazis?
I need to put Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You on here one of these days and beat it silly.
Interesting. I have read much on King and am familiar with his fall out with the NAACP when he started shifting the focus from race to poverty. As a teacher of history, so have my students. They have also read that Helen Keller was a devote socialist who said the leading cause of blindness was poverty. I have taught about many of the socialist leaders in this country that the powers that be have sought to silence and shut out. Gandhi was asked about Hitler and Nazism in an interview. He had a powerful, yet not all too surprising response. I apologize for my clumsy summary. Basically, Gandhi questioned how one fights a war when no one shows up to the battle field.
I am glad that you brought up King. He was a socialist who fought peacefully against unequal resource distribution, famine, and gregarious leaders with empty promises... His fight is not over. I can attest to that. However, it is overshadowed by the sexy intrigue of war. How many men still seek this rite of passage? How many believe that "saving the world from terror" is his hero's quest?
Truth to be told there are no good guys or bad guys. When one looks at the origin of WWII, Nazism rose to power as a consequence of Article 13, the guilt clause of treaty signed after WWI. Does it justify the war. NO. But, it shows the approach of making an entire country pay for the choices of its leaders doesn't make for good politics.
I am not so naive as to believe that a world without violence is possible. However, a world with far less violence is quite possible. A human only need say, "I refuse to fight this fight."
I have read several memoirs of people who have fought in wars that did not belong to them nor their ideology. I am always taken by the phrase, "We simply did not have a choice."
As my student from Sierra Leone said to me, "There is always a choice. Even if death is that choice; there is always a choice." She said this while we were reading, A Long Way Gone, the tale of a child soldier.
She is a survivor of war. She witnessed her father's brutal murder after he refused to join the military in Sierra Leone. Still, she held great pride in his refusal to participate. She saw her father as a power that served to end the impossible feud in that country.
When enough people refuse to fight, we terminate wars that seem to have no end like the civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda (just to name a few).
In war we are all guilty, no person who takes up a gun to murder another human being can claim innocence. End of story.
What to do with the ideologies that start wars? We learn to work around them, work within them. I can be taught flexibility, coexistence, and most importantly that there is enough to go around. When we learn how to share resources and live with less, we start the end to wars. If we don't, I chose death over participating in the violence. What a shame that it all too often comes down to this as a viable choice.
I understand the suggestion that violence begets violence. It does. But I guess my response to Gandhi would be that nobody showed up to the battlefield because they were all roasting in ovens. IMHO, his strain of pacifism worked because of the morality of the British. If his logic were extrapolated, we should all march out to meet Cthulhu with hugs and kisses when the time comes. It couldn't possibly eat us all, could it?
That is a problem with pacifism, if you choose not to fight and your opponent chooses to fight, it often leaves you at a disadvantage. You can sacrifice yourself, you can run, you can hide, but in all of those situations, you lose something.Loss and gain show that at the most basic level, war is an economic struggle. There may always be social reasons given why people fight, but that doesn't change its fundamental economic nature.
Sure, soldiers talk about being 'noble' and 'heroic' when they fight, but this is the social cover for the fact that many of them come from very poor backgrounds where their only other means survival is crime. They try to justify what they do the same way any of us would, by calling on tradition and pride.
The high-ups in the military may also use these arguments, and many of them believe in them, but they also accept that war is a political tool used for economic reasons, as it has always been.
There are large-scale agreements, like the one indicated by the statement 'there can be no war if no one shows up to fight', but institutionalizing pacifism requires a level of agreement beyond precedent.
We agree that murder is a crime, but this does not represent an agreement not to murder. Those personalities likely to murder continue to do so domestically, both for personal and economic reasons, and the government responds by killing them in turn. Even on the small scale, the solution is war.
It would be nice if people could agree to act so that they benefit one another, but that would require two impossible things. First, knowing what was really best for us, and secondly, educating and convincing everyone until they all got onboard.
It's hard enough to get a handful of people to agree on even the most simple things, and in the case of war, if one party decides to fight and the other party decides not to, the peaceable party had better have some way to stave off their destruction.
Unfortunately, the leading theories involve mutually assured destruction and preventatively large militaries, neither of which is actually helpful in avoiding war. Again, these are social justifications for economic and political actions.
Pacifism is a lovely ideal, and it would be amazing if we could convince everyone to work for mutual benefit, but most people have trouble working for personal benefit. More often, they are overpowered and outclassed by people who are extremely good at working for their own personal benefit, usually at the cost of society as a whole.
The degree of social cohesion and liberality we have achieved is remarkable, but even today, that freedom in high places is raised up on the backs of brutalized workers. We live just like the Victorian nobility, off of the ignorant suffering of the working class, we've just outsourced the working class.
I live here, in America, in quite remarkable comfort and splendor, because of the suffering and subjugation of hundreds of workers scattered around the world. Unlike the Victorians, we can't even see the symptoms of our unequal society unless we leave it.
My maid is not a woman in my house, but a group of faceless people who made my vacuum. The frightening part is that if all the people who have provided my goods and food died tomorrow, I'd never have the chance to notice. A new crop would rise invisibly and take their place.
I'm not even that well-off, but I am in a class above, supported by an international class system which is enforced even more crudely than the Victorians'. Our lower classes are kept apart by legal and geographical borders, in addition to the social borders which have always marked such distinctions.
We live relatively freely in a liberal society because there are bloody tyrannies just beneath us keeping us afloat. How is a general accord, even a legal accord, supposed to stop the violence initiated by those willing and able to employ it?
There have always been people willing to fight, some desperate, some who simply find it appealing, and some who seek to profit by it, and others born unable to feel guilt or fear.
When wars become too difficult to fight openly in the field, they are fought furtively in the cities. What is the pacifist response to the man with a suitcase bomb? What if he is the uneducated, mentally impaired tool of the self-justifying man who uses him for economic reasons?
If not all people can be made moral, if not all people can be made educated, if not all people can be made comfortable, then how can pacifism be enacted unless those people are subjugated, enslaved, or imprisoned?
I understand using it as an ideal for structuring acts, laws, and personal behavior, but like any ideal, doesn't it suffer in that those trying to bring it about act not from what is actually happening in the world, but what they would like to happen?
Any action not directed at a real, tangible problem, no matter how high its intention, is doomed to failure through its inaccurate aim, and hence is always a liability, since forces and energy will be spent fruitlessly, even harmfully. This wasted energy will always profit the guiltless, greedy warmonger, who spends no more than he absolutely must on social justifications or ideals, and spends as much as he can on whatever has proven most effective at gaining him more power, influence, and resources.
Since one animal first ate another, chief among the tools of power has been the destruction of the opposing force. I am not saying that this is the best of worlds, or my ideal world, or that I wouldn't change it if I could, but social uprisings have never freed us, they have just placed someone else in the seat of power.
But, frankly, how can we relate to the suffering of thousands of nameless faces? Coerr tells the story of one young girl so that we may relate to her and to the suffering that she, and many others have experienced. The author cannot cover every atrocity that has happened during the war, but he can make others aware about even a sliver of such atrocities (which is still quite a lot). Tell the long-standing pain that every single Japanese has been through, and children may well read a history book, not a creative work of art meant to stimulate the imagination and conjure depths of emotions. I believe the author's intent was quite the opposite of what you critique. By highlighting the suffering of one innocent child, the idea of death, of pain, of life being taken away, of dreams lost, Coerr portrays to children the realities of life and war in a very real and harsh way.
Overall though, love your critique as you have such a unique writing style invoking thought and reason.
Thanks, I'm glad you found something in it that spurred your thought. I do appreciate your comments and ideas.It's true that it's difficult to conceptualize the suffering of thousands, but that is precisely the danger. Since it is easier to sympathize with the suffering of one person, it is easy for authors to turn that suffering into a political message and to gain the sympathy of their readers.
The reason this book in particular bothered me was because it took for its example of suffering one of the least common and unusual cases of death in the war: those who died from the fallout of the nuclear weapon attack.
By focusing on this, the author does create great sympathy, but presents a skewed world view, specifically one that bolsters Japanese nationalism and anti-nuclear sentiment.
It frustrates me because she doesn't explore the use of nuclear weapons as an idea, she merely condemns it out of hand, despite the fact that very few people (comparatively) died in these attacks, and yet they served to end a war that was causing millions of deaths and promised to cause many more.
I won't say that their use was entirely justified, that's a bigger argument, but Coerr doesn't present the complexity of that argument to the children, she presents a story so over-simplified that it serves as propaganda. It's even more one-sided than the real story it was based on.
I don't know if she was portraying the 'realities of life and war' in a 'real way', because she was hyperbolizing the suffering of one sided and ignoring the fact that such suffering was occurring on both sides.
To me, the book evoked the same sense of unequal representation we see from the fact that any time a white college girl goes missing, we don't stop hearing about it for months (or years), but if a black girl goes missing, the story won't last more than a week. Yet, more black girls than white girls go missing, statistically, so the news is presenting a fake reality to us that statistically is the opposite of what is actually happening.
That's always the danger of focusing on the pain of a single person: if you choose the wrong person, you create a world-view that is biased, unbalanced, and inaccurate to reality.
Kids don't have great critical faculties, so what are the chances that they will question the heart-wrenching message of this book and ask what the political reason for the little girl's suffering was, or how many other people suffered in other ways during the war?
It seems more likely to me that they will simply turn the sympathy they feel for the character into uninformed political and historical stances about WWII, which is not productive or educational, it is merely emotional propaganda.
I can't believe they would even have this story I have the book it self but this story is just so beautiful once me and some friends attempted to make the cranes it didn't really work that well
I actually like the story but you're right. The author should have told the truth. I didn't know she completed the 1,000 origami cranes until I went to check on the internet.
I found some of your review to be interesting, but there are a couple of points that I would like to mention. You may be able to sit in bed and fold origami cranes for eight hours a day, but a child who is terminally ill with leukemia would probably not be able to match your pace.It is a perfectly normal human emotion to try and put a personal face on tragedy - particularly when exploring the topic with children. This makes it more 'real ' and easier for children to comprehend than simply using huge numbers. People killed during war or at any other time are people, not statistics and the more we realise that, the better.
Your review verges on coming across as resentful that the story is about a Japanese child, to be honest.
I understand that you think this is a one-sided account, but I think you're missing something critical about this book and about the purpose of writing in general. You say that by telling one persons story you turn a mutual war into a directed crime, but how else can you tell a story? Do stories like Number the Stars or Schindler's List need to also account for the economic ruin of the Treaty of Versailles? The power in this story is not that perfectly illuminates all of the intricacies of the war in the Pacific, but that it gives us all unfettered access to the consequences of the United States' decision to use the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now you can debate whether or not that was justified by the actions of the Japanese in China and elsewhere, but I really think you ought to be debating that in a history book or a foreign policy journal, not in a biographical young adult book.
I made hundreds after reading this. Mostly from magazines because we did not have origami paper. You get pretty fast.
Keely, you have a lot of interesting points, and I can see why you rate the book the way you do.I've read the book with 4th Graders in Japan and I think it worked well to get across the tragedy of war. I suppose it could have been written to provide more context, but some of that context comes in discussions and some of that context comes with further study in the future, or could. The book itself provides them with one touch point, sort of speak. No book can provide them with all of them.
I think it would be great if Japan published stories for their children about those who suffered because of the Japanese in WW2, for example the "comfort women". I don't think they do. The US isn't perfect, but I do think we publish a lot of books for children that are critical of our past, more so than in many other counties.
Sadako was a real girl and she didn't make a thousand cranes. To say that the author made the decision to not let Sadako make the thousand cranes is a flawed argument to base your review on.
Granny wrote: "I found some of your review to be interesting, but there are a couple of points that I would like to mention. You may be able to sit in bed and fold origami cranes for eight hours a day, but a chil..."Children deserve much better stories than simple emotional propaganda. A story can have that, and also the 'statistics' which show the reality of war, it's not too much to ask for both. Children don't need things to be excessively melodramatic for them to get it. The statistics are not mere numbers. They represent something, otherwise they wouldn't have existed in the first place.
The story of Sadako got me stuck on Seattle. There's a statue of Sadako in Hiroshima and a statue of Sadako in Seattle. Hiroshima and Seattle both have a peace park. I was stuck on Lifesong five months ago. I have been begging Mom to clean the CD. I'm also stuck on stereos. I named a guy Stereo, a guy Lifesong, and a girl Sadako. Kelsey says that naming a guy Stereo is worse than naming a girl Cosmo. Cosmo is not a girl's name and Stereo is not a person's name at all. Mom's stereo has nothing to do with Seattle. My most favorite city in Japan is Hiroshima because that is where Sadako lived.