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千羽鶴 senbazuru 1000 Cranes

This is a philological study of the Japanese word 千羽鶴 (senbazuru), a thousand cranes. It spans three lives of the word — a textile pattern from 1719, a string of folded paper cranes from 1828, and, after 1955, Sadako Sasaki's story — and examines how the number attached to her death, 644, entered English through two Western writers her own family disputes.

千羽鶴 · senbazuru · 1000 Cranes — a thousand paper cranes, folded for a recovery, a long life, and since 1958 for peace

Abstract

千羽鶴, senbazuru, is a string of many folded paper cranes, traditionally a thousand, made as a prayer; before that, a textile pattern of a thousand cranes — the crane lives a thousand years, so the thousand is long life. The pattern is the older sense, on record from 1719; the folded string is on record from 1828 and is in the dictionaries by 1898, offered at shrines, hung against summer flies, and carried to a sick mother's bedside. Sadako Sasaki, the Hiroshima schoolgirl the word is now best known for, folded cranes in 1955 after her diagnosis and died that October at twelve; the number of cranes she folded before her death, 644, comes from two Western writers, of 1961 and 1977, and not from her family, who say she passed a thousand and kept going.

Overview

The sense. A string of many folded paper cranes, traditionally a thousand, made as a prayer; before that, a textile pattern of a thousand cranes; the crane lives a thousand years, so the thousand is long life. 大辞泉 gives two senses: many folded cranes strung on thread, given for comfort or a sick-visit; and a pattern showing many cranes. 精選版日本国語大辞典 dates the pattern sense to 1719 and the folded sense to 1828 — the pattern is attested a century before the folded string [1]. 折鶴, the single folded crane, is separately dated to 1773 [1].

The words. 千 sen is a thousand. 羽 is the counter for birds, read wa on its own and ba after 千, as in 三羽 sanba. 鶴 tsuru is the crane, voiced to -zuru at the end of the compound. So the word is sen-ba-zuru, a thousand birds that are cranes, and the dz in the wapuro spelling senbadzuru is a typing convention for the same syllable. The crane's thousand years come from a Chinese book of the second century BC, the 淮南子, which the proverb 鶴は千年亀は万年, the crane a thousand years, the tortoise ten thousand, has carried in Japanese since the 御伽草子 tale of Urashima Tarō. A thousand cranes is therefore not a count but a wish, and every dictionary says so: 千羽は多数の意で、かならずしも正確な数をいうのではない, the thousand means many and need not be exact.

The text in English. JMdict gives せんばづる, (string of) many (traditionally 1000) paper cranes, and separately lists the Kawabata title, Thousand Cranes [2]. The house's title, 1000 Cranes, gives the literal count in figures.

The historical record

1719, 近松門左衛門, 傾城島原蛙合戦, a puppet play. A bride is dressed: 先づ上着のお小袖は。千代を染込む松葉色松に群れゐる千羽鶴。十二の雛を飼ひ育て, first the outer kosode, a thousand years dyed into pine-needle green, a thousand cranes flocking in the pines, rearing twelve chicks. The thousand cranes are a pattern on silk, and the twelve chicks are the wish for children that a wedding robe carries. This is the word's first appearance and it is a pattern, not a paper bird [3].

1751, a haikai anthology, 頭陀袋. 名も万年の千羽鶴, a thousand cranes whose name is ten thousand years, the crane's thousand and the tortoise's ten thousand folded into one congratulation. Still the auspicious image, not the folded paper [4].

1762, 近松半二, 奥州安達原, a puppet play, and its account in an 1880 miscellany. A peasant reads a placard: 此國の殿樣八幡太郞樣が、武運長久の爲ぢやというて、鎌倉とやらで鶴を千羽、金の札付けてお放しなされたげな, they say the lord of this province, Lord Hachiman Tarō, released a thousand cranes at Kamakura with gold tags on them, for long luck in war [5]. An 1880 miscellany cites a diary in Yoritomo's own hand said to be kept by the abbot of the Tsurugaoka shrine, dates the thousand released cranes to the eighth month of a Kenkyū year, and adds that it is not in the official history, 正史にみへ侍らす [6]. It is a legend of live cranes, and nothing known connects it to the paper ones.

1797, 秘傳千羽鶴折形, the oldest surviving book of recreational origami. Forty-nine ways to cut and fold a flock of cranes from a single sheet, each design named and given a comic verse. One is called 比翼, wing to wing, with the verse 天にあらばひよくのちぎりたのしまん　かすミの蒲團　雲どりの夜着, in heaven we would enjoy the pledge of wing-to-wing birds, a quilt of mist, bedclothes of cloud [7]. In this book 千羽鶴 means the connected cranes, a third sense, and its preface says folded cranes were already common knowledge. The designer was a temple priest in Kuwana, and the book was forgotten until an origami master republished it in 1957.

1828, a senryū in the 柳多留. 千羽鶴いたちごっこのように折り, folding a thousand cranes like a game of itachi-gokko, the children's hand-over-hand game that never ends. The first record of people folding a thousand paper cranes, and it is a joke about how long it takes [1].

1898, 落合直文, ことばの泉, a dictionary. せんば-づる 千羽鶴。紙を折りて、數多つらなりたる鶴の形をつくりたるもの, paper folded into the shapes of many cranes strung together. The first dictionary to give the word a headword gives the folded string and only that [8].

1913 to 1933, the small dictionaries and a folklorist. Between them they say what the strings were for. Hung from the ceiling in summer to keep the flies off: 夏日家の天井に懸け置きて蠅の糞を除ける [9]. Offered at shrines: 神社などに奉納す [10]. Offered at the Kishimojin and Awashima shrines in Tokyo for a girl's progress in her accomplishments: 女兒の技藝の上達を祈る … 鬼子母神・淡島などに捧ぐ [11]. And in a list of Edo customs: 千羽鶴 是は紙で折つて神社佛閣へ納めるのです, these are folded from paper and offered at shrines and temples [12].

1916, 小川未明, 千羽鶴, a children's story. An old woman notices the village shrine has gone lonely and neglected, folds cranes in red, blue and yellow paper, strings them, and hangs them on the lattice of the shrine's door: 千羽鶴を造って、お宮へ捧げたら … それを糸でつないで、お宮の拝殿の扉の格子につるしました. That night a white crane comes to her window as the god's messenger. The votive string as a plain village act, told for children [13].

1917, 泉鏡花, 弥生帖. A girl at the Kishimojin shrine asks for her mother's illness to be cured, and brings folded cranes of gold paper, silver paper and chiyogami — a thousand cranes. The typeset closes her speech nowhere; the break after cured is my own reading [14]:

「鬼子母神樣、雪がお願ひに參りました、何うぞ、母さんの病氣の治りますやうに金紙銀紙千代紙の折鶴、千羽鶴。

"Kishimojin, Yuki has come to ask you: please, let my mother's illness be cured." Folded cranes of gold paper, silver paper, chiyogami: a thousand cranes.

The prayer for a sick parent, with a string of cranes, thirty-eight years before Hiroshima.

1934, 小笠原長生, 晩年の東郷元帥, a memoir of Admiral Tōgō. The old admiral, himself dying, folds small cranes for his wife's sickroom and has them hung on a pine branch: 小さい鶴を澤山折りましたら、その松に飛ばせよ、とおつしやるのです。「これは、目出度い、目出度い、松に千羽鶴が飛んだ」, when I had folded many small cranes he said, let them fly in that pine. "How auspicious, how auspicious, a thousand cranes have flown into the pine." When the nurse forgot the fold he showed her himself; the same account is retold in a 1940 book on the admiral [15].

1941, 高村光太郎, 智恵子抄. The poet brings chiyogami to his wife in the hospital: 智惠子は大へんよろこんで其で千羽鶴を折つた。訪問するたびに部屋の天井から下つてゐる鶴の折紙がふえて美しかつた, Chieko was delighted and folded a thousand cranes with it. Each time I visited, the folded cranes hanging from the ceiling of her room had grown, and it was beautiful. In 1943 he asks the dead, 千羽鶴は折れたか, did you finish the thousand cranes? [16] The same year a teachers' manual recommends the thousand cranes as a class project, one crane from each child, which is how the postwar school custom already looks [17].

1949 to 1951, Kawabata Yasunari's novel. The pattern sense of 1719 persists into the twentieth century: Kawabata's serial novel takes its title from a furoshiki carried by a young woman at a tea lesson, patterned with a thousand cranes [18].

1955, 佐々木禎子, Hiroshima. Born 7 January 1943, she was two when the bomb fell about a mile from her house; she grew up well and ran on her class relay team; in the winter of 1954 the swellings began, in February 1955 the diagnosis was leukemia, and on 21 February she entered the Red Cross hospital [19]. In August, when a string of cranes sent by high-school students in Nagoya reached the ward, she began to fold. The Japanese biographical dictionary gives the story in one line: 「鶴を千羽折ると願いがかなう」と言う級友の言葉により鶴を折り続けたがよくならず, on a classmate's word that if you fold a thousand cranes your wish comes true, she went on folding cranes, but did not get better [19]. She folded with medicine wrappers and cellophane when the paper ran out; her family says she passed a thousand by the end of August and kept going; a Japanese encyclopedia's count is over 1,300 [20]. She died on 25 October 1955, at twelve. Her classmates' campaign built the 原爆の子の像, the Children's Peace Monument, unveiled in the Peace Park on 5 May 1958; the bell inside it carries the two words 千羽鶴 in the hand of the physicist Yukawa Hideki [20].

What is not a source. The legend of a thousand live cranes released with gold tags at Kamakura, in an eighteenth-century play and a later miscellany [5][6], is a story about the shrine's life-release rite, not about folded paper. The 1797 book is often named as the origin of the thousand-crane custom [7]; it is the oldest book about folding cranes, and its title uses the word for cranes joined from one sheet, a different thing from a string. The often-repeated line that folding a thousand cranes grants one wish is in the Japanese sources as a classmate's saying in 1955 [19] and in the dictionaries as a votive practice; no older text known states it as a rule.

The word in English

1958, Edward Seidensticker's translation, Thousand Cranes. The English title of Kawabata's novel, and the first form in which the word reached English readers in numbers, though the novel's cranes are a textile pattern. The capitalized phrase in the Google Books corpus rises from the 1950s and peaks in 1987, nineteen years after the Nobel prize [21].

1961, Robert Jungk, Children of the Ashes, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York. The English of an Austrian journalist's 1959 account of Hiroshima's rebuilding:

There is a Japanese belief that a sick person who, even on his deathbed, can fold a thousand paper cranes will be out of danger. As Sadako's leukaemia grew worse she bravely set about this task, and soon above her hospital bed there arose a web of strings on which the little cranes fluttered. But when the sick girl had just made her six hundredth little paper creation, her strength began to ebb away, and with No. 644 she was forced to give up.

This is the earliest English telling and the earliest appearance of the number 644 [22].

1962, Karl Bruckner, The Day of the Bomb, Van Nostrand. The English of the Austrian children's novel Sadako will leben (1961), the version many European schoolchildren read [23].

1977, Eleanor Coerr, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Putnam, New York. The children's novel that made the story a school text in English: Sadako folds 644 — Six hundred and forty-four… — and the book closes Her classmates folded 356 cranes so that 1,000 were buried with Sadako [24]. Her family, through her elder brother, says she passed a thousand and went on, and the Japanese article on her says the smaller number was spread to sharpen the tragedy. The 644 is Jungk's, sixteen years older than Coerr's, and it is disputed.

The ngram. Paper cranes is flat in English until the 1950s and rises through the 1960s and 1980s to its peak in 2019; thousand paper cranes is first real in the 1960s; origami crane is a word of the 1980s; senbazuru first appears in 1964 and is visible only after 2000; Sadako rises from the 1950s and peaks in 2016 [25].

Today. JMdict: (string of) many (traditionally 1000) paper cranes [2]. The house title 1000 Cranes is the house's own, the literal count in figures. A rendering must keep the number and the bird; the paper may be left to the reader, and the English phrase that carries the tradition is a thousand paper cranes. The word sits in a family of Japanese customs where many small acts by many hands stand against one person's danger — the thousand stitches of 千人針, the hundred shrine visits of 百度参り — and, like theirs, the thousand here is read as many rather than counted [20].

A reading

The word is older than its story and larger than it. For its first century in print it was a pattern, cranes on a bride's sleeve with the crane's thousand years dyed into the green. The folded string arrives in the 1820s as a joke about patience, and by the 1910s it was three homely things at once: a girls' offering at two Tokyo shrines, a summer charm against flies, and a bundle a daughter carried to Kishimojin for a sick mother. An admiral folded them for his wife in 1934 and a poet's wife folded them in a hospital in the late 1930s, so the sickroom crane was in place before the war.

What 1955 changed was not the custom but its weight: one child's thousand against a death the whole world had a hand in, and the word 千羽鶴 cast on a bell under her statue in a physicist's calligraphy. That is why the same three characters can hang in a sickroom, at a wedding, and at a peace park without contradiction. The number 644 belongs to a European book of 1961 and an American one of 1977, not to her family.

Notes

The wapuro spelling senbadzuru is a typing convention; Modified Hepburn writes senbazuru.

The Japanese Wikipedia article dates the modern string to at least 1916, from Ogawa Mimei's story; the 1898 headword and the 1828 senryū are earlier.

References

  1. 「千羽鶴」・「折鶴」, 精選版日本国語大辞典 · デジタル大辞泉, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/千羽鶴
  2. JMdict (EDRDG), 「千羽鶴」, at jisho.org. https://jisho.org/api/v1/search/words?keyword=千羽鶴
  3. 近松門左衛門, 傾城島原蛙合戦, 1719, in 近松門左衛門全集, 1923, scan 304. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1884384/1/304
  4. 頭陀袋, 1751, scan 42. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2539782/1/42
  5. 近松半二, 奥州安達原, 1762, in 有朋堂文庫, 1914, scan 117. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1913636/1/117
  6. 諸家随筆ぬきがき, 1880, scan 17–18. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2576028/1/17
  7. 秘傳千羽鶴折形, 1797, at ja.wikisource. https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/秘傳千羽鶴折形
  8. 落合直文, ことばの泉, 1898, scan 406. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/862875/1/406
  9. 和漢雅俗いろは辞典, 1913, scan 583. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/932526/1/583
  10. 秘密辞典, 1920, scan 100. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/962110/1/100
  11. 落合直文, 言泉, 1922, scan 301. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/969161/1/301
  12. 三田村鳶魚, 江戸っ子, 1933, scan 229. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1181053/1/229
  13. 小川未明, 千羽鶴, 教育の世紀 4巻7号, 1916, at Aozora Bunko. https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001475/card52642.html
  14. 泉鏡花, 弥生帖, 1917, scan 68. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/914760/1/68
  15. 小笠原長生, 晩年の東郷元帥, 1934, scan 110–111 · 聖将東郷全伝, 1940, scan 338–339. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1235733/1/110 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1073015/1/338
  16. 高村光太郎, 智恵子抄, 1941, scan 79. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1129197/1/79
  17. 芸能科工作研究折紙による練成, 1941, scan 19. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1267692/1/19
  18. Kawabata Yasunari, 千羽鶴, serialized 1949–1951.
  19. 20世紀日本人名事典 · 日本人名大辞典, 「佐々木禎子」, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/佐々木禎子
  20. 「佐々木禎子」・「原爆の子の像」, Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/佐々木禎子
  21. Google Books Ngram Viewer, capitalized Thousand Cranes, 1900–2019. https://books.google.com/ngrams/
  22. Robert Jungk, Children of the Ashes, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1961, at the Internet Archive text layer. https://archive.org/details/ChildrenOfTheAshes-English
  23. Karl Bruckner, The Day of the Bomb, Van Nostrand, 1962.
  24. Eleanor Coerr, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Putnam, New York, 1977.
  25. Google Books Ngram Viewer, search on paper cranes · thousand paper cranes · origami crane · senbazuru · Sadako, 1900–2019. https://books.google.com/ngrams/

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1, Takase Studios LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Checked · Claude Sonnet (Anthropic), 2026-09-15, citations — every claim tested at its address; most resolve; several resolve but differ — an inserted particle in one legend's quote, an inserted quotation mark in another, a year gap restated correctly against the Nobel Prize date, and a reading of the page's own composition line; one does not resolve — the page's kanji-composition line already reads as the account says it should, contradicting its own claim; the rest not openable, some resolved from a cache held here; every differing row re-opened by hand at the page image and corrected in the body