Red-crowned crane
In Japan the red-crowned crane, tanchō, stands for long life, faithful marriage and good fortune. It appears on wedding kimono, New Year cards and family crests, and for a time in the early 1900s it was thought to be gone from Japan entirely.
丹 (tan): red, the vermilion of cinnabar.
頂 (chō): the top, the crown of the head, as in the summit of a mountain.
Read together, tanchō is the red top: the patch of bare red skin on the crane’s crown, the only color on a bird that is otherwise white and black. The full name is 丹頂鶴, tanchōzuru, with 鶴, tsuru, the crane.
An old saying gives the crane a thousand years and the tortoise ten thousand: tsuru wa sennen, kame wa mannen. Cranes and pines appear together as a pair of long-lived things, on the January card of the hanafuda deck and in the decorations of the New Year. The crane is a season word for winter in haiku.
Tanchō pairs stay together for life. In late winter they dance on the snowfields of eastern Hokkaido, bowing, leaping and throwing their wings open, and the dance is part of how a pair keeps its bond.
Hunting and the draining of wetlands drove the crane out of most of Japan by the end of the 1800s, and by the early 1900s it was thought to be gone. In 1924 a small group was found in the marshes near Kushiro. Local people began putting out grain for the cranes in hard winters in the 1950s, and the population in Hokkaido has grown back to more than a thousand birds.
Folding a thousand paper cranes, senbazuru, is said to grant a wish. After the war it also became a wish for peace, through Sadako Sasaki, a girl in Hiroshima who folded paper cranes in the hospital in 1955.
The Tancho Tee draws a pair of red-crowned cranes, one standing and one mid-dance with its wings open, with 丹頂 set beneath them. The print is white on black, so the red crown is carried by the name alone.
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