Hiroshima: 14-Year-Old California Student Offers 3,000 Paper Cranes at Sadako’s Monument

The Yomiuri Shimbun

2:00 JST, January 4, 2026

HIROSHIMA — A student from California offered a thousand paper cranes at the Children’s Peace Monument in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima City in November.

Kyreece Imada, 14, who is engaged in activities praying for peace, learned about Sadako Sasaki, the model for the monument, at school. Kyreece is the daughter of professional golfer Ryuji Imada, who is from Hiroshima.

Sadako was exposed to atomic bombing radiation in Hiroshima when she was 2 years old. She was diagnosed with leukemia 10 years later and died. She is said to have continued to fold paper cranes while on her sickbed, believing that she would recover. Many paper cranes from Japan and overseas have been offered at the monument, which was built using funds raised by Sadako’s classmates and others.

Shocked at the horrors of the bombing, which caused lasting aftereffects even years after it occurred, Imada showed about 100 of her school friends how to fold paper cranes in October. She also taught children online in other states how to make them.

Imada visited Hiroshima in late November with about 3,000 paper cranes that the children had folded. She offered them at the monument and prayed. She also met an 83-year-old woman who was a schoolmate of Sadako’s at elementary school and had also been exposed to the atomic bomb. Imada listened to her memories of Sadako.

“I’m going to tell my school friends that many people, including children, suffered from the bombing in Hiroshima,” Imada said. “I want to collect paper cranes from not only Japan and the United States but also other countries, and come back to Hiroshima next year.”