Story
Nobody knows who first folded the double boat. The oldest picture we know of is in a French magazine cartoon from 1832, and children folded it in European kindergartens in the 1800s. It seems to have reached Japan with kindergarten teaching: Tokyo kindergarten material of 1878 shows it. In Japan it is called nisōbune or futatsubune, “two boats”.
Did you know? There are two ways to fold it: from a plain square, as here, or from a square with its corners folded to the middle. The finished boats look exactly the same, so even historians cannot always tell which one an old picture shows.
