This is a series of blogs that I am writing on origami. In this part, I am going to tell you about how origami started, and about some of the people who pioneered origami.
I love origami, so I also love reading old stories about origami. But history is almost always confusing because everyone has their own opinion. Here’s my exploration. There is no record on when origami first started. But paper was discovered in 105 A.D in China by a person named Cai Lun. One might think that paper folding must have started back then but there are no records of someone doing it as an art. Origami as an art started in the sixth century in Japan but it was called Orikata. Back then the monks of japan made something called a Shide, which is a purification wand.
Butterflies were made to decorate weddings and things named noshi were given as tokens of good luck.
But except for that, it was only for the elite because paper was not cheap back then.
The first known origami book was published in 1797 in Japan, called, Senbazuru Orikata which translates to thousand cranes origami fold. German educators, Friedrich Froebel and Rudolf Steiner included origami in education. Their contribution was so prominent that Froebel even had a famous Christmas decoration named after him called the Froebel star.
Origami was a little famous in Japan but it really became famous in Europe, Spain, where it was called, Papiroflexia or Pajarita. Back then origami was just a pastime for little children but one man changed it…the pioneer of origami, the grandmaster of origami, the face of origami, Akira Yoshizawa! Akira Yoshizawa was born in 14ᵗʰ march 1911 in japan. He grew up on a dairy farm with his family. When he was young, he loved to do origami. At the age of 13, Yoshizawa took a factory job in Tokyo. In his early twenties, he was promoted to a technical draft person. One of his responsibilities was to teach the juniors geometry. And he found origami to be a useful tool. Yoshizawa quit his job when he was 26, to pursue origami. He was the one who started taking origami seriously and started making more complex models. He was also the one who discovered wet folding in which, you have to make the paper slightly wet so the finished model keeps its shape. And he also discovered the symbols in the origami diagrams that we see now. He created about 50,000 origami models in his life including a portrait of himself out of one square sheet of paper!
Even though he made so many models, he never sold a single one. Instead, he used to sell Tsukidani (a Japanese dish) door to door.
Though Akira Yoshizawa’s contribution to origami was more prominent than any others’ at that time, there were many more people who contributed to the rise of origami like, Spanish author and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, he used to fold paper birds in cafes for his deeper discussions. And Margaret Campbell from England who published a book called Paper Toy Making, which contained a large collection of origami designs. And Gershon Legman from North America who was a folklorist, who arranged an exhibition of Origami models by the grandmaster, Akira Yoshizawa.
Stay tuned for part 2: The middle ages, in which I will tell you about the evolution of origami and the people who contributed to evolving origami!
