So yours truly ended up taking part in a paper plane throwing contest.
I’m going to be cheeky and suggest it was ‘sort of’ a Japanese thing to do. There was some origami involved, after all. Nothing like folding bits of paper on a wobbly craft table to make you feel more like a local.
Ultimately, we were a bunch of adults making excuses to drink beer in a park on a Sunday afternoon. The plane throwing was entirely incidental.
But we made a rookie error taking it public. On a weekend, on a super sunny day in a city centre. What fools we were. A barrage of eager kids descended on the design stand to spoil our grown-up fun. I wasn’t even organising the thing, but as someone who speaks passable Japanese I got roped in to hand out sheets of B4.
And with even more short people to try and beat, I had to put in my best effort. After some test throws, I wasn’t feeling too confident about my chances. My basic planes adopted the ‘death spiral’ approach of corkscrewing towards the grass.
I wanted to put some neat racing stripes on my plane, but some kids were way ahead of me on that one. So I improvised.
Hey, it was worth a go. And I don’t think you can see the sneaky bits of tape I used to stop it opening back up in mid-air. The ultimate prize was for greatest distance – style could come in a distant second for all I cared.
All too soon, it was time for me to step up to the oche. (I kid, of course. We didn’t have a proper oche like those pro darts players do. It was a piece of string staked to the ground.)
I placed literally middle of the field, in the end. Not a bad attempt if I say so myself. Didn’t manage nearly as far as one kid, who clearly has a bright future in structural engineering. I suspect he was Googling fold methods.
