A dragon from one piece of paper!

In 1999, 17-year-old Satoshi Kamiya, from Japan, won a TV show called the “Origami King Championship”. Years later, he folded something called Ryujin 3.5 — a full dragon with claws, wings and a curling tail, all from one uncut square of paper measuring two metres wide. He folded every day for about a month straight. People still try to follow his instructions today and get stuck halfway through.

The gigantic and the tiniest folds

Akira Naito got into origami by accident. Stuck in a boring work meeting, Naito grabbed the foil wrapper from a cigarette pack and folded it into a crane just to survive the hour. That was the beginning of his lifelong passion.

In 1977, he won a competition in Britain by folding the world’s smallest crane from a piece of paper just 3.5 millimetres wide, about the size of a grain of rice. But he didn’t stop there. He kept shrinking it to 1 millimetre, then even smaller.

Ordinary paper falls apart at that size, so Naito switched to plastic film and even built his own tiny tools from wire.

But then he faced another problem: static electricity. As the cranes became smaller and lighter, static charges would yank them off the table and make them disappear. He kept going anyway.

At the age of 82, he finally succeeded in folding a crane from a square measuring just 0.1 millimetres wide, about the width of a human hair.

At the other extreme, 800 people in Hiroshima built an origami crane with a wingspan of about 82 metres, longer than a football field, by first taping huge sheets of paper together. Same crane, same 20 or so folds, just two completely different sizes.

A caterpillar longer than six football fields?

In 2004, 60 people in Germany built a single paper caterpillar 649 metres long.

They used 25,000 sheets of paper and worked for 25 hours straight. Laid out flat, it stretched longer than six football fields.

In 2001, a team in Singapore folded a paper king cobra over 80 metres long. Elsewhere, another group folded an owl taller than a house.

Then there’s perhaps the strangest record of them all. For the past 60 years, Gary Duschl has linked together more than 2.9 million chewing gum wrappers into a single chain. Each wrapper is torn in half, folded six times and then linked into another. Today, the chain stretches over nine miles (about 122,066 feet)!

Senbazuru

In Japanese folklore, the crane is a sacred bird believed to live for a thousand years, making it a symbol of long life and good fortune. According to legend, anyone who folds a thousand paper cranes is granted one wish.

That is where the tradition of senbazuru, folding and stringing together a thousand cranes, comes from. People still practise it today for weddings, babies and loved ones in hospital.

Published in Dawn, Young World, July 4th, 2026