When Rika Matsuda was 7, she got a new bike.
"And I went to the park and started to ride it," Matsuda said, recalling the moment 10 years later, at 17. She told her story to an interpreter in her native Japanese.
"At first I was really excited because the bike was really, really fast."
But when she tried the brakes, nothing happened, and she slammed into a wall.
"My foot started to hurt and turned purple," Matsuda said. "It hurt so much that I had to sit down."
A few minutes later, she saw a man in his 20s walking toward her. She remembers him as large and muscular and wearing a suit. He was a stranger, and she was only 7, so she wasn't sure if she could trust him.
"But when he said, 'Are you OK?' I knew from his kind and gentle voice that he was a very nice man," Matsuda recalled.
The man took her to a water fountain and helped her wash her injured foot. Then he gave Matsuda his phone to call her grandfather. As they waited, the man pulled out a piece of paper from his bag and showed her how to fold an origami crane.
"He was really good at folding origami, and he taught me the right way to make a clean and beautiful crane," she said. "Maybe he wanted me to think about the paper instead of my foot."
When her grandfather arrived, the man helped get Matsuda and her bike back home.
"As we parted, he didn't say anything. He just smiled and handed me the origami crane," she said.
Later, she put the crane in her desk. Every so often, she would see it and remember the man's kindness.
Ten years later, as a high school student, Matsuda found herself thinking about that moment again. In English class, her teacher, Benjamin Johnson, introduced the students to My Unsung Hero and had them write stories of their own. She thought back to when she crashed her bike and the man who came to her rescue.
"I started to think deeply about that time and tried to remember the details," she said. "And I thought that maybe while I was on the phone with my grandfather, possibly [the man] wrote something on the paper."
She hurried home from school and unfolded the crane to check. He had. Inside was a well-known Japanese expression about how every encounter is precious.
Roughly, it means "We should treasure each time we cross paths with someone because it might never happen again." Or, more simply, "cherish the moment."
"Then I realized even more how kind and how nice of a man he was," Matsuda said. " And I thought, he's really my unsung hero."
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