Sadako Sasaki was born in Hiroshima, Japan, on January 7, 1943, two years before the atomic bombing that would ultimately claim her life.
Sadako Sasaki was born on January 7, 1943, in Hiroshima, Japan, to Shigeo and Fujiko Sasaki. She was the couple's second child, and by all accounts her early childhood was ordinary and happy, spent in a city that would soon become the site of one of the most devastating events in human history.
At the time of her birth, Japan was in the midst of the Second World War, and Hiroshima served as an important military hub, housing supply depots and troop staging areas. Sadako's family lived less than a mile from where the atomic bomb would later detonate. She was just two years old on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, an event she survived physically unscathed at the time but which exposed her to radioactive fallout that would manifest years later as leukemia.
Her birth date is significant primarily in retrospect: it frames her as one of the many thousands of Hiroshima's hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) whose lives were forever altered by the bombing, and it marks the beginning of a short life that would become a globally recognized symbol of the human cost of nuclear warfare and a beacon for peace and anti-nuclear activism.