There Are No Civilians During War
This is a story about a victim of war every bit as much as The Red Badge of Courage, Saving Private Ryan or Gallipoli. Where there is a battle taking place, there are no such things as civilians because the fundamentally dirty and uncontrollable aspects of military engagement make literally anyone within shooting distance a potential patriot, soldier or terrorist, depending upon one’s perspective. In the case of a particular nine-year-old girl living in Hiroshima on August 6 1945, the most honest attribution to give her status is enemy combatant. She wasn’t a soldier, she didn’t carry a gun, she presented no personal threat to any solider serving in the forces of the Allies at war with Japan, but she must still be regarded as an enemy combatant since she was targeted for potential instantaneous annihilation every bit as much as a high-ranking general or the lowliest buck private in the Japanese army. That girl eventually paid the price for committing just one single solitary act of war against the United States: being Japanese.
The Power of Determination
Cursed with a death sentence resulting from exposure to radiation released during the explosion of the atomic bomb which resulted in the form of cancer known as leukemia, the harsh, unvarnished truth is that Sadako has no real reason to try extending her life by even one day. With no cure for leukemia even now, she was faced with a finite potential of days left to her life and with the medical knowledge just for treating leukemia at the time woefully inadequate, every day which extended her life would eventually be little more than a day which extended her suffering. She could have given up hope the minute she learned of her prognosis, but she found a purpose to go on living even in the face of that gloomy reality. It can, of course, never be known for sure just how much shorter her life would have been had she not gone all in on the goal of making every single of those of thousand origami cranes. And, it is also irrefutable that as determined as she was to complete that goal, just the commitment wasn’t enough to over the ravaging effects of the cancer. But her determination to meet that goal of making those thousand paper cranes didn’t just extend her life span, it also increased the quality of that life which is, ultimately, the most valuable thematic lesson anyone can take from her story.
The Twofold Aspect of Death
Knowing that she is going to die soon has the effect of making Sadako think about what death means even when she wants desperately to think of something else. She is a very young girl who experienced arguably the single worst event in the history of human civilization and that trauma of the annihilation of inconceivable numbers of people all in the blink of an eye and even greater numbers suffering the slow death of exposure afterwards is the only thing that has really informed her concept of dying. (Along with, of course, being a young girl who probably could not even remember when her country was not at war with the rest of the world.) As a result, for Sadako, death can only be conceptualized in terms of loss, destruction and evil. It is only when another young leukemia patient at the hospital named Kenji dies that Sadako is made to understand that death is not always greeted with fear and sadness. One of the nurses on the ward illustrates how for Kenji—orphaned, alone, and suffering—death was not a thing to run away from out of the fear of loss, but to embrace as a release from pain and loss and that this view is not limited merely to young cancer patients, but people everywhere experiencing life not as a joyous thing to be valued and held onto as tightly as possible, but as a source of never-ending misery so great that in comparison the mysteries of what happens after death can be seen as the better option.
