With several years of experience hosting Japanese homestay exchange students, I know for sure that Japanese people have the most innovative, creative, useful, and just plain weird stationery. The stimulus to this post was a recent parcel I got from one of our previous guests, containing, among other things, some erasable highlighters. WOW. Sure, everyone knows you can erase pencils, and erasable pens are fairly common if you look (especially in Japan). Erasable highlighters are an extra step in the progression of awesome.
Now, I haven’t even started on origami yet. Needless to say, origami is extremely amazing, wondrous, awe-inspiring, and many other benevolent adjectives. Now, one would normally consider a paper crane to be a decent effort in origami construction. Needless to say, making 1000 cranes is a tremendous achievement; so good in fact, that you are granted a wish for completing it. A famous story is that of Sadako Sasaki, who suffered radiation poisoning after the Hiroshima bombing in 1945. Extremely sick and nearing death, she decided to fold 1000 paper cranes, so that she might be visited by a crane and have her leukaemia cured. She worked day and night folding paper cranes. She only folded 644 cranes, before she became too weak to fold one more crane, and died soon after. Her friends completed the senbarazu (1000 paper cranes), in her memory. The paper crane, especially senbarazu, is a symbol of world peace.
On a lighter note, there are many other amazing origami constructions. Recently, I found out how to construct polyhedrons with origami. Starting with a modular component, I built disks, cubes, triangular hexahedrons, and stellated octahedrons. The crowning glory was a stellated icosahedron, which used well over 30 pieces of paper to construct. Here is proof that I have too much time on my hands.
That’s really sad. At least she didn’t get up to 999 and die. That would’ve been terrible.
Oh goodness, I’m getting pingbacks!
Comment by hatkirby — December 13, 2008 @ 9:27 am
You can easily see where I stopped writing this post, went out and did something for a couple of hours, and came back, and wrote it some more, in a completely different mood. It changes pretty suddenly, that’s why! I should really allocate more time to writing each post in a single session.
Comment by bluem937 — December 13, 2008 @ 9:54 am
MY LAWD. TIS NOT ORIGAMI WHEN YOU USE MORE THEN ONE PAPER, SILLY.
Comment by J.D — December 22, 2008 @ 10:26 am
Well yeah it is actually. Have you ever asked someone Japanese about it? Considering Origami is a Japanese tradition, I’m pretty sure the Japanese person who told me would know. Besides, if you aren’t going to call it Origami, what are you supposed to call Japanese folded paper constructions?
Comment by bluem937 — December 22, 2008 @ 10:34 am