Japanese Origami Vocabulary: Yamaori, Taniori and the Words for Every Fold

The core idea: two folds, one crease

Origami (折り紙) is literally folded paper, from oru, to fold, and kami, paper. Every model, from a paper cup to a dragon, is made of creases, and a crease can be folded only two ways. Taniori (谷折り), literally valley fold, bends the paper toward you so the crease sinks. Yamaori (山折り), literally mountain fold, bends it away so the crease rises like a ridge. The kanji 山 even looks like a peak.

Now the key point: a valley seen from the back is a mountain. Uragaesu (裏返す), to turn over, changes one into the other without moving a single crease. Most Japanese diagrams draw a valley as an evenly dashed line, tensen, and a mountain as a dash-dot line, ittensasen. There is no official standard, and some diagrams swap the two, so check the key on the first page.

UnihongoVocabulary

点線てんせんのところで谷たに折りおりにします。Make a valley fold on the dashed line.

The verbs you hear first

Instructions are verbs strung together in the te-form: otte, hiraite, tsubushimasu. Books use the polite form, orimasu; a teacher with children uses the te-form with ne, otte ne. One grammar point matters from the first step. The shape you are making takes ni, and the part you are moving takes o. Hanbun ni oru is fold into half; kado o oru is fold the corner.

Shapes, sides and creases

Two instructions open most models, and they are easily confused. Sankaku ni oru folds corner to corner along the diagonal, taikakusen (対角線), literally the opposite-corner line, and gives a triangle. Shikaku ni oru folds edge to edge and gives a four-sided shape, a rectangle the first time. The corners are kado (角), the edges hen (辺), the middle mannaka.

Origami paper has two sides. Omote, the front, is usually the coloured side; ura, the back, is white. Iro o soto ni means fold so the colour ends up outside. Orisuji o tsukeru, make a crease, means fold, press, and unfold, leaving a line, orime, to guide a later step. A teacher at a community centre talks a group through the first moves.

Beyond the basics: named folds built from valleys and mountains

Here the organising idea pays off. Each named fold is valley and mountain creases in a set pattern, and the names describe the result. Dan-ori puts a mountain and a valley side by side. Nakawari-ori opens a two-layer point and pushes it inside itself, so its creases reverse. Once you see the valleys and mountains inside a name, the diagram stops being a puzzle.

Folding a crane, step by step

The crane, orizuru (折り鶴), literally folded crane, is the model every Japanese child learns, and its steps use most of the words above. The diamond you reach at stage two is seihō kihonkei, the square base; after the petal folds it becomes tsuru no kihonkei, the crane base, the starting point for many other models. The parts are atama, head, kubi, neck, o, tail, and hane, wings. A grandmother is teaching at the kitchen table.

UnihongoVocabulary

三角さんかくに折っおって、もう一度もういちど三角さんかくに折りおります。Fold into a triangle, then into a triangle again.

Senbazuru and counting cranes

Senbazuru (千羽鶴) is literally a thousand cranes, counted as birds: sen, a thousand, ba, the bird counter wa after a sound change, and tsuru, crane, which becomes zuru. It is a set of many cranes threaded on strings, and the number need not be exactly a thousand. Classmates fold one for a friend in hospital or a team before a tournament. Since Sadako Sasaki, a girl exposed to the Hiroshima bomb, folded cranes during her illness in 1955, they have also stood for peace, and strings of cranes arrive at Hiroshima's Children's Peace Monument every year. Here a class is organising one.

Spoken reality: books, teachers and the paper itself

Books write short steps, often in the polite form, and lean on the pictures. Teachers talk more, with sound words: pittari, exactly aligned, and shikkari, firmly. A favourite piece of advice is to run your fingernail along the crease, tsume de shigoku. Origami also names the paper itself: packs of fifteen-centimetre squares are sold at 100-yen shops, and patterned paper is chiyogami. Origami o suru means to do origami; for a particular model you say tsuru o oru. When you get lost, a few lines are enough.

Origami is a play-based route into Japanese in the same way games are; a separate guide covers building a study routine around play.

Common mistakes when following origami in Japanese

Reading a dash-dot line as a valley. At small print sizes the dots disappear, and the line looks merely dashed. Look for the dots, and check the book's key, before you fold.

Hanbun o oru instead of hanbun ni oru. English says fold it in half with an object, so learners reach for o. In Japanese the result takes ni, the part you move takes o: kado o sankaku ni oru, fold the corner into a triangle.

Leaving an orisuji fold in place. Tsukeru sounds like adding something, so learners keep the fold. It means make the line, then open the paper again.

Starting with the wrong side up. Iro o soto ni means the colour must end up outside, so for a triangle fold the white side faces you when you begin. Beginners put the colour up and end with a white model.