Shuzo Fujimoto’s 101st Birthday

Shuzo Fujimoto (sitting) with editors of his books for Project F, standing from left to right: Taiko Niwa, Satoko Saito, Tomoko Fuse. Picture author unknown, received by me from Satoko Saito, who got it from Taiko Niwa.

October 27th, 2023, will be the 101st anniversary of Shuzo Fujimoto’s birth. For this anniversary, I’m presenting to you a picture of Fujimoto not published before (as far as I know). It was taken at his home, in or around 2012, and shows Shuzo Fujimoto (sitting) with editors of his books for Project F, standing from left to right: Taiko Niwa, Satoko Saito, and Tomoko Fuse. Author of the picture is unknown. I got the image from Satoko Saito, who in turn got it from Taiko Niwa. The quality is very poor, and I couldn’t get a higher resolution version, so the version published here is upscaled with AI (some artifacts are visible).

Last year, we celebrated Fujimoto’s 100th birthday, and that was also the year I did most of my research on Fujimoto’s life and work. In 2023, my research had to slow down, but nonetheless I have a few developments to report:

• further work on the Catalog of Fujimoto’s Works
  • reverse-engineering some models for which no images are available in Fujimoto’s books, only textual descriptions; I got help from the community with some difficult fragments of Japanese text
  • drawing some of those models before I get the time to fold them all
  • folding further models and publishing some of them on my web page
• additional research material
  • I received from Roberto Morassi a number of models folded by Fujimoto himself
  • I got a book and a magazine where Fujimoto’s works were published from Ayumi Hayatsu and Ako Kawasaki
• teaching Fujimoto’s models and talking about his person
  • at the German Origami Convention, I gave a talk about Fujimoto and showed models folded by his hand, as well as taught his models
  • at Outdoor Origami Meeting, I had a display of my folds of Fujimoto’s designs, taught his models, and published instructions for two of his models in the convention book
  • at the Convention of Polish Origami Society, I showed the models folded by Fujimoto himself, talked about his work, and taught his models in what ended up being a several-hour marathon
  • I gave origami workshops based on Fujimoto’s designs at my workplace

I wish to thank everyone for the encouragement, additional information, translation help, and research material I have received so far. Even based only on the materials I already have, there is lots of work still waiting to be done.