1000 Cranes

千羽鶴 (senbazuru): a thousand paper cranes, a string of folded cranes made as a prayer. 千 (sen) is a thousand, 羽 (ba) is the counter for birds, and 鶴 (tsuru, voiced here to zuru) is the crane, which in Japanese lore lives a thousand years, so the thousand is a wish for long life and, as every dictionary says, means many rather than an exact count. The strings have been hung in a sickroom for a parent's recovery, offered at a shrine for a girl's progress in her accomplishments, folded by a class for a classmate, and since 1958 folded for peace, after Sadako Sasaki of Hiroshima folded them through her last illness at twelve and her classmates raised the Children's Peace Monument, whose bell carries these three characters in the hand of the physicist Hideki Yukawa. Before it was paper the word was a pattern, a thousand cranes flocking across a bride's wedding robe, which is why the same word can hang at a wedding, in a sickroom and at a peace park without contradiction. It carries a long life, a recovery, and peace. 千羽鶴 is composed of the kanji 千 (read sen) meaning "thousand", 羽 (read ba) meaning "feathers; counter for birds, rabbits", and 鶴 (read zuru) meaning "crane; stork".