The “Peace on Your Wings” cast closes the show in front of a photo of Sadako Sasaki at one of the Aug. 5 performances at the Aratani Theatre (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
A moving musical adaptation conveys the story of Sadako Sasaki.
By P.C. Staff
The story of diarist Anne Frank’s untimely demise as a young victim of hate and world war has resonated across generations of readers throughout the world, thanks to assigned reading and book reports.
“Peace on Your Wings” lyricist Laurie Rubin (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
Similarly, the story of Sadako Sasaki — a hibakusha whose life ended at age 12 in 1955 from leukemia attributed to the radiation from the genshi bakudan dropped from a U.S. bomber over her hometown of Hiroshima, Japan, when the two nations were at war — has more recently also become part of the world’s culture, sparked in part by Eleanor Coerr’s book “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.”
Inspired by a legend that one who folds 1,000 origami cranes would have his or her wish granted, it would become the defining and defiant act of a girl who only wanted her health back.
The magical thinking that inspired Sasaki has nevertheless also inspired people of all ages who have learned of her story to make ending war and promoting peace a priority.
Is it any wonder that the story of Sadako and her paper cranes would become a musical stage play, “Peace on Your Wings”? It was a journey that began at Hawaii’s Ohana Arts Youth Theatre Co. in 2014, thanks to the married couple Jenny Taira, the composer, and Laurie Rubin, the lyricist.
The “Peace on Your Wings” cast serenades the “Shadows for Peace: The Hiroshima & Nagasaki Experience Speaker Forum” panel on Aug. 3 at Higashi Honganji in Little Tokyo. (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
In August, the cast, musicians, production team and its producers visited Los Angeles, not just for the Aug. 5 and 6 performances at the Aratani Theatre in Little Tokyo but also to meet and hear from actual, now-elderly hibakusha at an event titled “Shadows for Peace: The Hiroshima & Nagasaki Experience Speaker Forum” held on Aug. 3 at Higashi Honganji, also in Little Tokyo, just days before the Aratani shows.
American Society of Hiroshima-Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Co-President Junji Sarashina (with mic) relays his memories of when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
One of the speakers, 97-year-old Junji Sarashina, co-president of the American Society of Hiroshima-Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors, related his bucolic boyhood in Hawaii, first in Maui, then in Honolulu. His father was a Buddhist minister. He shared how he went to Japan with his family when his elder brother had to return to take over a Buddhist temple in Hiroshima. Their father, however, stayed behind in Hawaii.
Then, the United States and Japan went to war. Toward the tail end of the war, the younger Sarashina was forced to work as a machinist at an ordnance factory. One morning in 1945, everything changed.
“I stepped out of the factory. At that moment, it was on Aug. 6, 8:15 in the morning when this orange blast — at the same time a tremendous explosion force — knocked me flat,” Sarashina remembered. “Fortunately, I was standing next to a concrete wall. The building collapsed. The rooftop, bricks, window glass flying all over. And I was covered with this debris. A while later, I realized that I’m still alive. But I had no feeling. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see.”
“Shadows for Peace” panelists (from left) Hiroko Nakano, Taeko Okabe, Takako Agustsson, Howard Kakita and Junji Sarashina (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
It was one of the sobering, real-life stories that helped the young actors relate not just to the story of Sadako Sasaki, who was just 2 when the Hiroshima bomb fell, but to people who were able to remember the experience of living through the explosion.
After the L.A. performances, the long-awaited goal of the Ohana Arts team happened in September. They were finally able to fulfill their own wish: put on the play in Sadako Sasaki’s hometown of Hiroshima. Maybe there was something to folding all those cranes after all.
The cast of “Peace on Your Wings” performed on the Aratani Theatre stage in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo on Aug. 5 to convey the inspirational story of Sadako Sasaki. (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
It was a vision that was supposed to happen on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — but it was delayed three years because of the global pandemic. It could not be helped — but it finally did happen. It was a poignant, touching “homecoming” for the young performers who had spent so much time and energy to tell the story of a girl who decades earlier was not much younger than they were now.
(An NHK story about “Peace on Your Wings” in Hiroshima may be viewed at youtube.com/watch?v=QCskKXssVho.)
