Interview 2017 Leeuwarden Holland 2017
About: A journey with Manna
In 2017, I ( Marten Sale Brouwer ( Manna Ori ) was featured in the Leeuwarder Courant. By the way, I’ve appeared in the newspaper 50 times, on TV 30 times, and on the radio about 30 times. But the article from 2017 was my biggest interview: four full pages with a large photo and an extensive interview.
Here is the text of that interview: Marten Sale Brouwer overcame a difficult childhood in the Trynwâlden and became an origami artist in Japan. He now holds two world records in the noble art of folding.
When life gets tough, there’s always the crane. Ask Marten Sale Brouwer about it, and his face breaks into a radiant smile. Once, he folded a thousand cranes from a single sheet of paper. According to legend, this guarantees the folder a lifetime of robust health. He encountered his first crane in 1992. He was bedridden with a broken back and received an origami booklet. “A kind of puzzle book,” he saw it as back then. He started folding, and after a while, he managed to fold four cranes from one sheet. It turned out to be the beginning of an insatiable addiction that, after a struggling artist’s life in Leeuwarden, would eventually lead him to Japan, the cradle of origami art. More on that later.
Marten Sale Brouwer was born in Gytsjerk, in a small house without running water, gas, or electricity. “It’s not there anymore; there’s a community garden there now.” His father was a music teacher and pacifist; his mother was deeply concerned about the fate of the world.
“I’ve always been pretty quiet. Sometimes I’d even get beaten up in class. I often came home with scratches and bruises.” Little Marten was also a bit of a “suurtsje” (a Frisian term for a sulky child), his mother says now. He never fought back; at home, pacifism was instilled in him. “Until one day my father saw me getting beaten up and told me I could hit back.” He nearly sent his attacker to the hospital. “After that, I was scared of myself for a long time. What if someone pushed the wrong buttons, and I lost control? Later, I got into a few more fights, but the bullying stopped. Kids like to tease, but they don’t like getting hit.”
After years of being bullied, when he was embraced by a group of teenagers, he gladly joined them. They were about fifteen or sixteen, and some were testing the boundaries between pranks and petty crime. “At one point, I joined in on a break-in. I got caught. My mother was distraught at home, and rightly so.”
While his mother searched for ways to keep her son on the straight and narrow, one of her friends suggested a kibbutz in Israel. Marten was open to it, and off he went to Israel at eighteen. “It was good to be in a different environment and meet new people.” He learned discipline, hard work, and how to drive a tractor. He also saw bombs flying overhead as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict played out. Wars had always hit the Brouwer family hard. During the height of the Cold War, his mother had wondered if having children was the right choice. She took thirteen-year-old Marten to a major peace demonstration against nuclear weapons in The Hague.
But there, in mid-1980s Israel, war had never felt so close to Marten.
PEACE FOUNDATION
It set something in motion—something that only fully took shape during the outbreak of the Second Gulf War. Brouwer founded a peace foundation. He gave talks at schools and organized origami projects for children. Now, more than fifteen years later, the world still seems perpetually ablaze. Does he notice any impact? “In small things, yes.” He talks about people he’s touched, about someone who has carried a crane folded by Brouwer for years.
They might seem like small steps, but Brouwer draws hope from them. “I want people to discover their talents, like I did myself. I don’t have the illusion that I can really change anything. But even if there’s no hope left, it’s still important to keep giving people hope. Especially the children. If the world is to know peace, we have to teach it to the children. I want to give kids inspiration and hope. Look, I’m not afraid for myself. But it’s about the future of the world’s children. That’s what’s at stake. When I see kids, I think: ‘Oh my, you have no idea what’s looming over you.’”
According to Brouwer, a good future for humanity on this planet is far from guaranteed. “Humans have so many opportunities to make something of the world. And yet we mess it up so badly. If we have a tree that could feed us for a lifetime, we chop it down for five minutes of warmth. That’s how we treat the earth. I can’t comprehend that shortsightedness.”
“People sometimes ask about the peace foundation: ‘Are you still doing that?’ I see lots of famous people working on it too. If their actions and words don’t even make a difference, who am I? That’s tough sometimes. But people don’t realize how fragile the world is. They have no clue. Do you know how close we’ve come to nuclear war?”
Thinking about all that calamity can make Brouwer a bit melancholic. The remedy is seemingly simple: folding. “Origami is therapy for me too. Against the destruction of nature, the way people treat each other, the wars being fought.”
SEARCH
Enough calamity for now. That Brouwer is sitting here in Japan, calling himself an origami artist, is the provisional pinnacle of a long and sometimes difficult search. As a young man, a few years after returning from Israel, he broke his back. Dark years followed. He lost his job, a few friends, and his fiancée, and sometimes lost himself in thoughts of death.
Until an origami booklet crossed his path a few times. In 1992, on his sickbed, as mentioned. And later, while living in The Hague, he saw an old Chinese folding book at his neighbors’ place. Brouwer became fascinated and made copies. Seven years later, in a shop in Utrecht, he stumbled upon the exact same book. “With the address of those neighbors written in it. You could see that as a sign. You’re searching, and you attract things. If you’re not looking, you won’t find it either.”
He threw himself into folding. He’d always been creative, just like his parents. A few years earlier, he’d started painting. “I never knew what I wanted. In 2001, I suddenly realized: I have exhibitions. Now I can call myself an artist. A career never interested me much. I had simple jobs. Cleaner, something in a cheese factory, at the fish market. But making things—that’s important. You can be proud of that, and it builds self-worth.”
His blossoming love for origami and his concerns about faltering world peace soon brought him to a significant city in world history: Hiroshima. He was inspired by the story of Sadako, a girl who was two when the Americans dropped an atomic bomb near her home on August 6, 1945. Sadako survived the inferno but developed leukemia at eleven due to the bomb’s radiation. A friend told her about a Japanese legend: whoever folds a thousand cranes can make a wish. In her sickbed, Sadako folded 1,300 cranes before passing away at twelve.
Brouwer followed in Sadako’s footsteps in 2007 when he folded a thousand cranes from one sheet of paper and presented them to Hiroshima’s mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, who was in The Hague for a peace conference. Akiba invited Brouwer to visit Hiroshima.
WORLD RECORD
He did so in 2010. It took some effort to get there. “I knew: these cranes are going to Japan. But a trip like that costs a lot, and I didn’t have the money. I started arranging sponsors and teaching origami classes. Some people donated money too. It got more and more serious, and eventually, the funds came together.” It became an incredible journey. He donated the cranes to the Peace Museum in Nagasaki. He already loved origami, and from that moment, he fell in love with Japan too. During that same trip, he attempted an origami world record in Hiroshima. He succeeded: in fifty-four minutes and thirty seconds, he folded a hundred cranes.
Since then, he’s been the first non-Japanese person ever to call himself an origami world champion—an unparalleled achievement in the noble folding art, one that didn’t go unnoticed in Japan. Footage of his record attempt was broadcast on Japanese television. That same day, he broke another record: folding a thousand cranes with others in one hour and forty-four minutes.
Brouwer’s name in the origami world was established. Though that world is traditional—origami is centuries old, and the Japanese take it very seriously—Brouwer was seamlessly welcomed into it. His designs were published in origami journals, and he received a certificate for extraordinary contributions to Japanese society.
His patience helps him with folding. “I’ve always been pretty patient. But I had to learn it. Sometimes I had no choice. Like when I spent nine months searching for the right paper to make those thousand cranes.” He prefers using washi paper, beloved by origami artists. “Thin but incredibly strong. It has to be, because sometimes you fold sixty-four layers.” From a seventy-by-seventy-centimeter sheet, he creates a piece ten by ten: a lotus flower with four cranes, each carrying four tiny cranes on their wings. “That takes me almost five hours. Not nonstop, though. I can’t, with my back.”
In 2011, he moved to Japan, initially for three years. He met a Japanese woman, Yukie, whom he later married, and he hoped to publish origami books in Japan. And, importantly: while his craft was often dismissed as “folding papers” in the Netherlands, in Japan, Brouwer found a place in the long, respected history of an almost mythical art form. His creation of new designs made him beloved. “Origami hasn’t seen much innovation in over a hundred and fifty years. Sure, there was John Montroll with his African animals, but the traditional designs have barely evolved.”
He says he’s created four thousand original origami designs and could make ten thousand more with his system. Some of them are featured in the two origami books he’s published in recent years. His work hangs in the museums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both of his world records are now seven years old. Is he still hungry for more? “If I’m alive and well, I’d still like to fold a thousand cranes in one day. That’s never been done before. I’m very happy with how things are now, but I don’t feel like I’ve arrived yet.”
The Japanese are often seen as reserved and distant, with little tolerance for outside influences. Though Brouwer doesn’t speak Japanese, he speaks the language of origami—and with it, the language of the Japanese soul. “The Japanese are pretty closed off. But through my origami, I’m accepted and recognized everywhere. My Japanese will never amount to much. Still, I notice little of that supposed xenophobia. I’m good at what I do, and that helps.”
KIND GESTURE
“The Japanese are more reserved than we Dutch are used to. They don’t hug or shake hands. There’s a lot more loneliness here. At the same time, I see they crave connection. Sometimes I fold a little something for someone on the subway and give it to them. You can tell they really appreciate it.” Brouwer has learned by now that the distant, seemingly impassive nature is just a thin, hard-to-penetrate layer of the Japanese character. “Once they’ve taken you into their hearts here, they’d go through fire for you. I have lots of friends here and almost never feel lonely. For New Year’s, I had invitations to ten different parties.”
The enthusiasm with which the Japanese embrace him stands in stark contrast to his difficult childhood in Gytsjerk and the surrounding area, some thirty years ago. “I bloomed pretty late. I don’t regret that. It’s been good for me to do and experience so many different things first. Everything I’ve done has brought me to where I am now. I’m happy with what I get to do.”
Marten Sale Brouwer has found his purpose. In Japan, there’s respect for his art, and people see him. That was different when he was young, and later during his struggling artist years in Leeuwarden. He’s never become cynical. “When I meet a new person, they get every chance to become a friend. Even though I’ve been bullied, abused, betrayed, and scammed before. But I can’t hold that against someone new. Call it naïve, but that’s just how I am. I’ve found more balance in myself now.”