BOSTON — The sensei (master) of paper airplanes can't recall anything unexpected happening while flying one.
"Always, something expected happens," Yasuaki Ninomiya explained. But the question prompts a reminiscence from Ninomiya, a retired Japanese engineer whose books on paper-airplane design are best sellers in Japan. It's the story of the roots of his fame.
On Christmas Eve, 1966, his wife spotted a tiny newspaper item: The First Great International Paper Airplane Contest, sponsored by Scientific American magazine, was to be held in the United States the next month. Any Japanese who wanted to enter a plane could bring it to the Pan American Airlines office and Pan Am would fly it to the United States for free.
"Since I had been making airplanes from childhood, I made racing planes and put eight of them in a box so as not to be broken and asked Pan Am to send them," Ninomiya said. His planes--among the nearly 12,000 entries from 28 countries--arrived in good time to compete in the Pacific Basin division of the contest, held in San Francisco.
The rest is paper-aviation history.
"I won the grand prize in both duration and distance flights," said Ninomiya, who requested written questions and responded enthusiastically in kind--and in Japanese. "Since then, I've been living with paper airplanes. The small article was the beginning. I am thankful to my wife."
A recent photo shows a delighted Ninomiya posing in a room of his Yokohama home. The ceiling is thick with parked airplanes, hanging like sleek, white bats from their paper noses. He's been making \o7 kami hikohki \f7 for more than half a century.
"I am one of those airplane fans who think an airplane is the most beautiful work of art a human has ever created," he said. "I like everything that relates to airplanes--from a real plane to a model airplane to movies in which an airplane appears." He has built rubber-band-powered planes, gas-powered models and radio-controlled craft. He pilots a real one.
For 30 years, Ninomiya worked to develop microwave communications for Nippon Telegraph & Telephone. But the prizes he won in 1967 inspired him to bend his research skills toward another development project: the paper airplane. Not surprisingly, he couldn't find a job doing that. But he concluded that "it is a suitable theme for one person to pursue." So he did. "Making a paper airplane became a job from just a mere hobby."
