It was a thrill for me when I was in Japan recently to receive two spontaneous lessons in origami from complete strangers.
In the process, I learned two terrific techniques – one, how to make a very different crane, what I now call my Japanese crane, which does not flap its wings but looks extremely elegant and refined, and two, how to make a Ninja star in less than a minute.
The first lesson happened in Kanazawa. We had gone to see an exhibition of modern art, but the museum – like many museums and art galleries around the world – was closed because it was a Monday.
Walking back to the hotel, I spotted a paper shop selling origami paper. I went in and the owner, a very polite, smiling lady, showed me how to fold a paper crane in the Japanese style. I loved it. Watched the video half a dozen times until I got it. I have made more than a dozen of these beautiful folded creations.
The second lesson was when I was travelling on the train from Hiroshima to Miyajima. The lady sitting next to me saw me showing friends the paper crane and she immediately offered to fold one for me.
I gave her a piece of origami paper and in a flash she made the perfect crane. Then, she asked for another piece and within 60 seconds produced a perfect Ninja star. She made each fold with precision and the result was perfect.
I have yet to manage to do it as fast as she did or as perfectly, but I will keep trying. I suspect she had been folding paper since she was a kid and it was now second nature.
Perhaps I mentioned before how much pleasure I get from this simple process of folding flat sheets of square paper into beautiful objects. For me, it is a pleasant form of meditative, precise, repetitive action that produces order and form and transformation out of a formless flat surface. It is like seeing a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis.
In Hiroshima, I stopped by the memorial to Sadako Sasaki in the Peace Park there. She was the girl who folded hundreds of paper cranes before succumbing to radiation sickness resulting from the A-bomb dropped on August 6, 1945.
At the Sadako site, I found hundreds of paper cranes on display, some linked in long, cascading chains of colour, others massed together to create astonishingly beautiful pictures.
A couple of Japanese ladies came up to us at the monument and handed us superbly folded origami cranes in the Japanese style. I was touched. And they were very happy to see my gratitude and admiration.
