Akira Yoshizawa

Akira Yoshizawa died on his 94th birthday as the world’s most famous origami artist and the man who made folding paper an art form. He began his career as a teen in a machine tool factory, then as a technical draftsman. Asked to teach junior employees geometry, Yoshizawa demonstrated with origami and it changed his life. He gave up his career in the late 1930s and devoted himself to folding paper, making a living just to survive. Yoshizawa went on like that his entire life, although after the mid-1950s he became increasingly famous for his artistic representations through origami, eventually having exhibitions all over the world. He is famous for developing the method of “wet folding,” and for devising the wordless notation system still used in origami design. Yoshizawa’s books Atarashii Origami Geijutsu (1954) and Origami Dokuhon (1957) were highly influential and spread the gospel of origami worldwide. Yoshizawa estimated he made more than 50,000 works, and he didn’t sell any of them.