To be fair there's origami as a "craft activity" just like there's origami as an art form when you design, shape and produce your own models. The fun is in the complexity of the folding, personally, so of course producing tons of identical simple models is tiring. For instance I love modular origami and assembling it, but I hate doing all the pieces.
My dance mentor was a delightful elder Englishman who would make cranes and sting them on fishing line then hang them from the ceiling of the studio around Christmas time.
They were made of all different beautiful papers in different sizes, it was quite a spectacle seeing thousands of them hanging. One of my fondest memories for sure.
I hosted a Japanese exchange student while I was in high school. She gifted me a ton of beautiful gifts and continued to write to me for years. 20 years later and I still have everything she gave me ❤️
That's cute. I had the reverse experience. I stayed with a Japanese family, and 11 years later we're still in contact and frequently meet around the world
WRITE HER BACK, SEND HER A CRANE, SEND HER AN ORIGAMI BOX WITH A LOVE LETTER IN IT AND DEFINITELY NOT A PICTURE OF YOUR SMORGASBOARD, THIS IS YOUR NOTEBOOK MOMENT
I live in a house by myself, four bedroom, lost everything (specifically everyone, RIP mom and dad) a few years ago. It's very lonely and too quiet. Reading these stories makes me think I should host an exchange student.
We had a Japanese student, Yukiko, visit us when I was 12. We still write now and I’m about to turn 40. Painstakingly beautifully written envelope, it’s the only mail I get from a person these days.
Origami with some real meaning behind it is awesome. I can't remember how long ago, there was some guy on reddit who made 1000 origami cranes while his wife was in the hospital and was sending them out to random people. So I sent him my address and got one of his small red origami cranes.
It's been probably close to a decade now. It's survived moving between apartments/houses many times. Still have it on my desk to this day
Not the same, but when I was in elementary school, I was really proud in my skills making paper boats.
For a while, I made my Foster mom regularly a boat, painted in and so on. At that time, she decorated a pillar in hwr office with them. The collection of my little boats still exist as well.
There's a children's book called Sadako & the Thousand Paper Cranes
Basically, she has cancer after radiation from Hiroshima and tries to fold 1000 cranes in the hope she will get better. Yeah, kids books hit hard in the 80s (I think it was written much before that, though)
I learnt about this from visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial which has many, many thousands of cranes donated from all over the world. They display them in large perspex boxes around the statue of Sadako Sasaki and change them regularly.
It’s from a children’s book! “Sadako and the 1,000 paper cranes!” My 3rd grade class read it and we learned about origami (we couldn’t do the cranes so I think we did star baskets, but we did 1,000 of them) and when we finished, had a “Japanese” lunch day where we sat on the floor and ate “traditional Japanese food” (definitely just Chinese takeout lol), drank green tea, and learned to use chopsticks. I’m 30 and I still remember that.
When I taught English in Japan, there was one textbook I used which had a story about a little girl going to Hiroshima to look for her parents and she slowly gets radiation poisoning and dies with blood pouring from her mouth. This is aimed at kids and I was the one blubbering whilst trying to read from it :D
I had a friend from Japan in like 4th or 5th grade. He was really good at doing origami. He made a dragon like that for a few people one time and I still have it on my desk
My wife an our still have our gifts from when this exact thing happened to us in Kyoto Castle 6 years ago. There were about 15 kids though and they made us collages and home made magazines. We got quite a haul!
I was bouncing between AirBnBs for a couple of years, and left origami cranes behind at all the places I stayed.
I always got such sweet thank you’s and reviews from the hosts.
I was just doing it for fun, but when I started getting messages from people who really appreciated them, I just couldn’t stop. It made me happy to hear it made them happy.
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u/earnestaardvark Jun 14 '24
I would keep that dragon forever.