Japan and Me
Amita Jain (Syosset High School)
I was contentedly crunching away on my fourth piece of chocolate Pocky when suddenly the taste in
my mouth wasn’t so yummy anymore. It was all but nauseating. I had just entered the first exhibit in the
Nagasaki Peace Museum to be greeted with videos and pictures lining the walls of grotesque mutilated
bodies, each limb out struck at odd angles, each face twisted with agony.

After four hours of stomach-twisting and heart-wrenching episodes like those, I told my Okaasan that
I needed to leave. She understood and let me find the way out. While my stomach was settling, I sat in the
museum lobby and watched paper cranes flutter overhead. It was a Japanese belief that making a thousand
paper cranes would grant a wish. And what was above me, were not a thousand paper cranes, but tens and
tens of thousands of them.

It struck me then how absurd the whole idea was. Honestly, folding paper was going to grant peace in
the world? It was going to bring happiness to the wretched and miserable? I scoffed at the ridiculousness
naiveté of it all. My Okaasan softly sat down next to me and took my hand. It wasn’t really the act of
origami or the wish itself, she said. It was the hope that each wish was carried by.

It is appalling that a misfortune of any magnitude be ignored in the face of another. For me, and really
for everybody, no tragedy, no matter how small, should go unnoticed, whether it is one child going hungry,
or an entire country dying of AIDS. The only difference is the availability of people willing to help. That
void is where I want to step in. I want to be a person who can put a smile back on a tear-streaked face. I
want to be a person who can feel somebody else’s pain and make it go away. I want to be a person who can
make somebody else’s life a little more bearable. I want to be a person who cares.

Ideally, I would like to use my language skills, my science abilities, and my commitment to
participating in positive change as a physician. More importantly, however, I believe that exhibiting
compassion and simply being available to help can make the necessary difference in people’s lives. While I
may not change the world, and can’t reverse the horrors of Nagasaki, each patient that I effectively treat,
every conversation that allows a patient to feel respected, and every opportunity to give back to our global
community is, for me, a lovingly executed fold in my own peace crane. In that, I think I can hear a soft
flutter of hope.

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