Thank you for joining me to learn about my recent adventures in Japan! Before we get started, I want to share with you the details of my earliest interest in Japanese culture and how it motivated me to study in Tokyo and learn the language.
In fourth grade, I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a children’s novel about the plight of a Japanese atomic bomb survivor to leukemia. The protagonist, Sadako, hopes to recover by folding "a thousand cranes" for a long life. Cranes are sacred creatures that live a thousand years according to Japanese legend. My fourth grade teacher was Japanese-American, and she was kind enough to teach her students how to fold paper cranes in an origami workshop. I always liked crafts, so my favorite subject has always been art, and I was excited to learn something new. From this experience with the art of paper folding, I came to admire the origami paper which had colorful intricate floral patterns because they reminded me of the patterns you see on kimono fabric or the fake sakura (cherry blossoms) decorations inside my local Japanese restaurant. I remember going to the public library to look for more books about origami, only to find there were very few in English.
