Beacon Hill resident Stan Shikuma sits in Seattle's Peace Park, a small grassy area with benches along a congested and narrow street that feeds into the University Bridge. Next to Shikuma, who's active in the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and Tsuru for Solidarity, are the remains of a statue: the bronze figure of a young Japanese girl holding an origami crane.
The statue embodied the story of Sadako, a Japanese child affected by the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima during World War II. Her image came to symbolize the peace movement. After 34 years in this location, the statue was cut off at the ankles and stolen on July 12, 2024.
"It felt like a tremendous loss. It felt like someone had died," Shikuma said, reflecting on responses from the community when they received news of the mutilation and theft of the statue. "The loss was emotional for a lot of people because she represented so many things: peace, hope, life, the good qualities that children bring to this world."
This statue was one of a series of bronze sculptures and plaques that were stolen in 2024. Others included a bust of Dr. José Rizal taken from the Beacon Hill park of his namesake, 10 donor plaques at Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights Memorial Park in southeast Seattle, and a raven statue in Shoreline.
Since the loss of the statue of Sadako, Tsuru for Solidarity, JACL, Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple, and a number of other organizations committed to the repair and restoration of the site. The Friends of Sadako Artist Selection Committee picked Beacon Hill artist Saya Moriyasu to create an art installation at the park to replace the statue.
Moriyasu has had her studio on Beacon Hill for over three decades. She says the intergenerational, immigrant culture of the neighborhood feels like family. Her father was from Hiroshima prefecture, and some of her relatives died in 1945 in the atomic bombing. Her father left Japan in the mid-1950s to study in the U.S. He met her mother, a caucasian woman, in Oregon, where they studied together.
When Moriyasu was 15, she visited Hiroshima's Children's Peace Monument, a statue of a young girl with an origami crane. The plaques at the statue featured the story of Sadako Sasaki.
Sadako Sasaki was 2 years old when the atomic bomb dropped about a mile away from her home in Hiroshima. Despite the difficulties post-war, Sadako was healthy and known as a swift runner. In middle school, Sadako started feeling ill and was diagnosed with leukemia.
As her health waned, she heard about the tradition of folding 1,000 origami paper cranes, as the birds are a symbol of long life. Sadako set out to fold that number of cranes with the hope for long life. Paper was scarce at the time, and she used pill wrappers and other paper scraps. Nurses, friends, and people from the Red Cross brought her paper. She passed away eight months after her cancer diagnosis. She had folded 1,300 cranes.
After Sadako's death, children throughout Japan launched fundraising efforts to pay for the Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima to honor the children who died as a result of the U.S. dropping the bomb. The monument was erected in 1958 and incorporates an image of Sadako and an origami crane. People from all over the world continue to send origami cranes to Hiroshima to display at the monument.
Moriyasu followed threads of the movement started by Sadako in Hiroshima to Seattle. Floyd Schmoe, a Quaker activist and educator who established the American Friends Service Committee in Seattle, was a key figure in creating the park and commissioning the former Sadako statue. Peace Park was created across the street from what was then the American Friends Service Committee building (now the University Friends Meeting center).
For the project, Schmoe used award money he received from the Japanese government in 1982 for his efforts to help Hiroshima victims of the atomic bomb post-war. The park was dedicated in 1990, when Schmoe was 95. Moriyasu found that the park incorporated fragments of bombed buildings from the atomic blast in Hiroshima and pieces of the Berlin Wall. She also read that Schmoe was known to tend the land at Peace Park until he passed away 10 years later.
Before working on Peace Park, Schmoe had spoken out publicly against sending 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into incarceration camps in 1942, assisted Nikkei students in transferring to Midwest and East Coast universities to avoid incarcerations, and helped resettle Japanese Americans, post-war, who were returning from incarceration.
Since the theft of the statue, Shikuma says many groups have offered support for the restoration of the site, including Seattle Hiroshima Club, From Hiroshima To Hope, Veterans for Peace Seattle, and others. Shikuma added that people from Japan have also reached out, including a high-school student from Hiroshima who organized a fundraiser and sent $1,000. NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) has also reached out to document the story of Peace Park.
Moriyasu says she sees a thread between the multiple stories about Sadako and the monuments dedicated to peace. "It's all the little gestures that bring things together, the feeling of many people pitching in to make something happen," she said. "It's like 1,000 cranes."
The Fierce Nonviolence Pilgrimage takes people ages 18 to 35 to areas in Washington State that relate to nuclear weapons. Participants hear from tribal members about the Hanford site and from a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Application deadline is June 15.
This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, “Resilience Amidst Hate,” in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.
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