Kirsten's Blog

Some people have asked me – Why 1000 Cranes?

I’ll ignore Howard’s “How can anyone have not come across the 1000 cranes?” comments, as aspects of far eastern cultures are not usually common knowledge in the west. Unless you spend half your life browsing the internet, or have been around when the cranes was one of the usenet memes. Anyone else remember usenet newsgroups?

If you go to Japan, it is possible to see strings of cranes, beautifully folded and strung, made with a variety of coloured papers. The idea is that you take your thousand cranes and dedicate it to the temple. The Crane in Japan seems to be a very powerful symbol, standing for long life, health and happiness. Strings of cranes are given at auspicious times in a person’s life, such as to newborns, to wish them a long life, weddings to wish the couple a long and prosperous marriage and even from girls to the boy they wish to attract! I believe it is possible to buy the strings of cranes to dedicate them, but that seems to me to be missing the point – making the cranes takes a great deal of time and dedication (I worked out that I can fold cranes at a rate of about one every 4 minutes, meaning a total of 66hours 40 minutes just to make them all, without counting stringing them!) and it seems to me that this time and energy is what you are dedicating, not the physical end product.

I still haven’t answered the question though, why are we doing this? Well, it started with a very different story. Maria is studying the book The Snow Goose at school, and for one of her homeworks she was asked to make an origami “goose” and provided with a website link to instructions for making it. I looked at this goose and objected that this is nothing more than the standard Japanese crane, and it looks nothing like a goose. This led to looking at pictures of the strings of cranes, a discussion of the practice of making a thousand and an agreement that they are very pretty! I unearthed a pack of origami paper and at the weekend we cleared the table and timed how long it took to make 10 each. The resultant string which I took a picture of and uploaded as a test of my iPhone WordPress app is a lovely thing, and took us an hour including stringing and clean-up. The advantage of Origami being that cleaning up afterwards is gathering your models, packing away the paper and washing hands – very simple

My next task is to find a steady source of origami paper, I really don’t want to buy the whole 1000 sheets at once, I don’t think I could trust that they’d stay clean and un-creased for the time it will take to complete all the strings. If we get to the end, I promise I’ll upload pictures of the full thousand displayed!