Gerardo, Thank you for posting your question, which is always a challenging one. We think we know all that’s been around, but something new comes up that surprises most of us. Yesterday I was browsing some museum’s collections online, which have been growing a great deal in the last years, and... what a surprise! The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired in 2013 a collection of Japanese foldings dating back to 1697! That make them by far the oldest origami known up to date. (I should not say “origami” because the word began to be used much later, but for the purpose of understanding here I guess it’s ok). The collection, as you can see in this link, is composed by two booklets containing a total of 128 models or origata (for what I can see it’s mostly tsutsumi, that is, wrappings) and 23 separate models (again, tsutsumi, and other figures that are not easy to recognize, could be butterflies? or more tsutsumi as they have strings). We should believe the date is correct, as the Met hardly would make a mistake in this regard (they have experts who can read old Japanese). It’s also interesting that the collection seems to be a sort of “course” (although the Met does not use that word) given by an Ogasawara master (they were samurai who mastered the tsutsumi technique and protocol) to a pupil. This collection predates by more than 150 years what Hatori Koshiro wrote in Origami^5 but it is understandable because the latter was published in 2011 and the Met purchased the collection in 2013. It would be great if in the future someone could pay a visit to the Met to study the collection in detail. As it looks in the picture, it seems incredibly well preserved. Link to the information here: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78428?sortBy=Relevance&ft=origami&pg=1&rpp=50&pos=59
Enjoy Laura Rozenberg
