The award came with $4,000, and Schmoe put that money straight into the park. He also urged the city government to create a peace park, and his prize helped draw grants that carried the work forward.
Sadako and Her Thousand Cranes
At the heart of Peace Park stood a life-size bronze of Sadako Sasaki titled Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Sadako survived the Hiroshima bombing at age two, and about ten years later she died of leukemia.
From her hospital bed, she set out to fold one thousand origami cranes. By one account she had finished 644 when she died, and the people around her kept folding in her place. Her story turned the paper crane into a symbol of peace shared around the world.
Darryl Smith's sculpture
Sculptor Darryl Smith created the Seattle statue and donated much of the labor himself. He shaped the figure from a classroom photo of Sadako, from Eleanor Coerr's 1977 book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and from his own knowledge of anatomy.
Look for what sculptors call alightment, the sense that the figure is poised at the edge of a drop, just about to release a crane into the air. As of 2023, the statue was the only outdoor monument in Seattle's municipal art collection honoring a female historical figure.
Seattle's Sadako has relatives elsewhere. In 1991 Smith cast an identical twin, The Peace Child of Hiroshima, which stands at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. A bronze crane by Smith in Mukilteo, Washington, rounds out a set of three, honoring early Japanese Americans in Mukilteo and reconciliation after the incarceration.
Why people leave paper cranes
In Japanese, the folded crane is the orizuru, a figure rich with meaning. Tradition says that folding a thousand of them will make a wish come true, and after Sadako the practice also became a gesture for peace.
Here at Peace Park, schoolchildren and other Seattle residents often draped strings of cranes over the statue. The same custom lives on at Sadako's statue in Hiroshima.
Vandalism, Repairs and the Statue Theft
The statue has weathered more than one attack. In December 2003, vandals damaged an ankle and cut off the right arm, and with the original mold gone, Smith took an impression from the matching statue in Utah to restore the Seattle figure exactly.
Afterward, several people, including members of Sadako's family, asked that the statue move to busier Green Lake Park. The Seattle Parks Department kept it at Peace Park instead, reinstalling it in mid-January 2005. Community donations helped cover the repair, and neighbors gathered to celebrate Sasaki's legacy.
Vandals struck again in September 2012, and the statue was repaired once more. Then, on July 12, 2024, the Seattle Police Department reported it stolen: thieves cut the bronze away above the ankles, leaving only the feet. A local historian concluded the theft was likely about the value of the metal rather than a political act. Check with Seattle Parks and Recreation for any updates on the memorial.
