Serious Playing with Paper Airplanes

By Louis Templado, Staff Writer of the Herald-Asahi

There's something about spring that brings out all manner of madness in people. How else to explain the small army of archers--or that's what they looked like from a distance--pirouetting skyward on the lawn of Tokyo's Mizumoto Park in Katsushika Ward on April 15?

photoHand-launch competitor Satoru Hoshino checks his plane's alignment. (Louis Templado)

The sun was climbing toward noon. But this group--bodies bent back, arms stretched high--seemed intent on bringing it down with invisible bows and arrows. Only when you get closer do you realize what they're actually doing. They are playing with paper airplanes.

Only playing isn't exactly what they would call it.

A hundred strong and made up mostly of retirees and a few middle-aged dads with kids in tow, they arrived in hopes of eventually reaching the country's top paper airplane competition--the All Japan Paper Airplane Championships aka the Japan Cup, now in its 14th year. The event won't be held until October in Fukuoka Prefecture, but the long trail of weekend time trials starts now.

"There's more to paper airplanes than you'd think," Kazutoshi Yamada says. Yamada heads the Mizumoto paper airplane club, one of three groups staging preliminary competitions in the Tokyo area.

"Sure, it looks like anyone can do it and in fact anyone can--that's one of its appeals. But the longer you stay with it the more you realize how difficult it really is."

Forget those lopsided deltas you threw around the classroom during rainy days past. The competitive paper aircraft of today are bleeding edge creations--think Right Stuff rather than kids' stuff--often designed by engineers on computers and spread among competitors via the Internet.

Competitions, too, are right tight affairs, with participants divided into groups and competing in different classes. The competitors can practice as much as they like but get only five officially timed throws. The total time aloft determines the winner of the competition.

Hand catapult specialists are the ones who look like archers. They use a small stick and long rubber band to launch their craft. Their planes are small and can soar straight up to a height of 50 meters before leveling off.

Hand launchers meanwhile use larger, heavier craft. They run like Olympic javelin throwers, whipping their planes into the oncoming wind. Their planes go whoosh as they immediately half-loop and head away about 25 meters above the ground.

Competitors are further divided between standard "pilots," who limit themselves to Japan Paper Airplane Association-approved designs such as the Cub 3, and those in the free category, who bring their personal creations to the events.

"No matter what class they're in, though, you can always tell who's a beginner," says one 67-year-old veteran (who wouldn't give his name) as he watches two newbies. "They are always facing the wrong way."

The trick to getting maximal flight times, experts say, isn't so much in getting your hands on the right airplane design and gluing it together really well--although that's important--but in knowing how to read the wind.

"Bend the rear of the left wing slightly and then aim it in this direction," he instructs the novices. "That way they'll cut a curve right into the updraft."

It's even easier to spot hard-core enthusiasts. They show up at the competitions with specially built cases housing several airplanes--each one tweaked differently for different flight conditions--and extendable fishing rods. Topped with a streamer and planted in the ground, a rod can give valuable information about the velocity and direction of the wind currents above the competitors' heads. (Another thing they're good for is retrieving airplanes stuck in trees and on rooftops.)

Yet, what makes these veterans stand out isn't so much their equipment, but their almost Jedi-like air and affinity with the forces of nature.

"Success is a matter of developing your senses and letting yourself feel," says Satoru Hoshino, a 48-year-old father who competes in the hand-launch category for the "total responsibility, physical and mental" that it requires.

"The hints you get can be subtle--you feel a cool breeze brush your cheek as your body feels heat rising from the ground. That's the sign of a thermal; it means it's time to launch."

Experienced flyers also keep a close watch on their rivals: When someone achieves a "max flight" of a minute or more (which earns the top limit of 60 points), they follow the flight path carefully. Immediately after, they go up to the timekeepers and start firing off their planes.

"Competitors are free to use any part of the field," Yamada says. "Finding the sweet spot and knowing when to launch are part of the challenge."

It can get extreme, though, he adds: "Competitors can join as many preliminaries as they want--anywhere. So if someone doesn't get good times here, he or she might head off as far as Osaka, where the conditions might be better."

Competitive paper airplane throwing is a real--if literally lightweight--sport, says 1994 Japan Cup winner Jun Tamba.

"It has similarities to ski-jumping," explains Tamba, a researcher in thermoengineering in the science city of Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, where he also heads the paper airplane society. "It requires excellent design, precise adjustments to your equipment and, finally, mastery over your mind and body."

To be sure, not everyone feels so deeply about it. Most participants are more like Hironori Yagi, 62, and his wife, Kikue, 61, a couple for whom paper airplanes are a rediscovered childhood pastime that now keeps them moving and fit.

"I like anything to do with flight and switched over from radio-controlled planes eight years ago," Hironori says. "I got tired of people always complaining about the noise and the risk of accidents. I could only use the park in the early morning when it was empty, so it was lonely, too. Now we go to competitions where we're surrounded by other people."

What makes the competitions fun, he says, is the fact that results depend as much on luck as on skill.

"I like paper airplanes because I like walking," Kikue says. "There's certainly a lot of it involved because you just don't know where your plane will land."(IHT/Asahi: April 21,2007)