What Do You Get When a Book, a Bird, and an Angel…?

What Do You Get When a Book, a Bird, and an Angel…?

By: William Kumai

At Nanzan Junior College (now closed) in Nagoya, Japan, I taught a year and a half seminar course of about 24 students. For our last gathering after their graduation ceremony, I would give each student a present consisting of four origami models: a book, a flapping bird, an angel, and a tsuru/crane envelope to contain them all. I told them the book represented their hard studies; for many of them, this was the end of their education journey. The flapping bird represented their freedom as full adults in society. The angel was a reminder of the Christian ideals they learned from Nanzan Junior College, a Catholic institution. Finally, the tsuru envelope can remind them of their rich Japanese culture as they venture out into the world at large. It did take a few evenings folding all the origami models, but I believe my students were happy to receive them and appreciated the manual labor (definitely not mass-produced) contained in them.

An illustration of a large pile of origami figures.

William Kumai, Nanzan University, Nagoya

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *