A Seattle teen found a hidden message in a stranger's paper crane

When Rika Matsuda was 7 and living in Japan, the brakes on a new bike failed and she hit a wall at a park. Good News Network, drawing on KUOW's My Unsung Hero, reported on October 9, 2026, that a stranger in a suit helped her up, washed the cut on her foot, and let her call her grandfather. While they waited he folded a paper crane and, when her grandfather arrived, handed it to her without a word. She never learned his name. She kept the crane on her desk.

A decade later, in Seattle, teacher Benjamin Johnson asked his English class to write about a Good Samaritan, using NPR's My Unsung Hero as the model. Matsuda thought of the crane, went home, and unfolded it. Inside were two characters, a Japanese idiom. She translated it as a reminder to treasure each meeting, because it might not come again, or more simply to cherish the moment.