Next week is my birthday blog, so until then, have a great week!
Edit: and here it is!
I took a Japanese language course back when I was in high school. It was pretty rare to have Japanese offered as a foreign language in a public high school at that time. I was very grateful to have that opportunity, but the teacher left much to be desired. It is not that she didn’t try, it’s just that it took years to unlearn all the outdated vocabulary words she taught our class (I still refer to dictionaries as “字引” [jibiki] sometimes, even though the current word, 辞書 [jisho] has been in common use for at least 20 years now), to relearn how to properly write kanji, and to shake the feeling that I would never learn Japanese because I had at one point been under her tutelage. I have completely forgotten my first Japanese teacher’s name, but I will call her Origami-sensei, for reasons that will become quite clear.
Origami-sensei, for all her eccentricities, had one in particular that I will always remember. In order to pass her class, the student needed to fold a traditional origami crane. This was rather strange, particularly because our class would spend entire class periods folding paper instead of studying Japanese. I was not very good at origami, and having my hands bruised by lineman drills at football practice didn’t help. I was becoming a bit of the clichéd “bumbling jock” trying to fold paper into something that resembled some type of bird. I remember spending several nights practicing how to fold the creases just right in order to pass the class. This was sort of funny because I was actually one of the top students in that class. I went along with it because Origami-sensei did seem like the type of person who might fail a student for not following her guidelines. On the third or fourth try, I managed to pass the origami test, and I can still fold a paper crane today.
Though Origami-sensei was sacked the next year and replaced by a much better and much more memorable teacher, I still wonder to this day why in the world she thought it was necessary to fold paper cranes in order to learn Japanese. To be honest, I was convinced it was just because she was crazy, but I have come to realize that traditional origami can be a pretty metaphor for understanding Japanese society. Origami as an art has many predetermined paths, and the folds may seem identical to the outside observer, but every piece of origami has the personality of the folder, though how apparent those folds are is really up to the person creating the paper art. Living in Japan, I can fall into the same folds as many other people; the path I travel may have been tread before, and others will follow the path I create.
It is that very realization of the repetition and the cycle of taking what was there and making it your own that is at the heart of traditional origami. Making a star, a box, or any sort of animal through origami requires both a vision of what the ideal craft should look like and the will to practice bringing that ideal to life. Even at its most immaculate, the origami can only live up to the icon that it is supposed to resemble. However, through hard work and persistence, that paper craft becomes more than a crane or a star; the origami becomes a representation of hard work and of how something as simple as a piece of paper can become complex and beautiful.
I can only hope that the origami cranes I leave behind me will be remembered and cherished by everyone that comes in contact with them. Perhaps mastering the art of origami isn’t simply about learning the Japanese language or Japanese customs. Maybe the real lesson that lies in origami is that sometimes the only way to learn something is to keep doing it over and over again. Thank you Origami-sensei, wherever you might be.
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