History of Origami

The history of origami is rather obscure, but clearly cannot pre-date the invention of paper in china about two thousand years ago. The word origami is not Chinese but Japanese and is used worldwide out of respect for ancestral home of the art. When China invaded Japan in AD 610 the secret of paper making travelled with them and immediately assimilated into Japanese culture.

The growth of creative origami in the west began in 1950s, though it was minor Spanish tradition and practised by the occasional creative individual before that time. Curiously, since that same decade, the art has also undergone a major creative revival in Japan, so much so that there are now several hundred Japanese language books currently in print, most contain new creative work. A great amount of new work is also coming from west, in all manners of style ranging from charmingly simple to the astonishingly complex and from the expensive to geometric.

Ref.(Papercraft and Origami)