Various good points made by Peter, Zack, and Diana. Let me add just a few comments.
Zack asks, “Would he really so carefully preserve them, and then desire to keep them utterly unseen and unappreciated after his death, until they rotted away?” I think the answer is clearly “no”, because he took great care to fold his artwork from archival papers, and packed them carefully; his intention was more likely that they would be appreciated, displayed, and cared for and that they would NOT rot away. And no one I know of suggests “the idea that he regarded these carefully preserved works as things to be thrown away in the trash.” That’s a straw man argument. Rather than intending that they be thrown away, he intended that they be preserved forever in their original condition. And having seen the quality of his artwork today that he’d folded 30 or more years ago, he’s likely to get his wish. But his desire that his body of work be preserved and displayed is not the same as desiring that others could fold approximations of them. In the world of painting, an artist may want his or her artwork preserved and displayed, but not want paint-by-number versions of them made available. We don’t know, and can’t possibly know, why Yoshizawa refrained from diagramming his most impressive works. It could be, as Zack suggests, that he wanted to keep some secrets (and I think that motivation probably played something of a role). It could also be that he felt that even with instructions, no one could fold those works as well as he could, and he didn’t want to see poor folded versions of his children. Yoshizawa left his body of work to be managed by his widow, Mrs. Kiyo Yoshizawa. Really, all that we know for sure about his wishes was that he delegated to *her* how his legacy and artwork was to be handled. And I can say from my limited experience via participating in the book “Akira Yoshizawa: Japan’s Greatest Origami Master” (https://www.origamiusa.org/catalog/products/akira-yoshizawa ) she takes a very active and firm role in determining what may or may not be done with respect to his artwork. My participation was writing a foreword; in the foreword I described the process of reverse-engineering his Cicada from a CP and step folds that he sent to Gershon Legman back in the early 1960s, which were provided to me by Laura Rozenberg, from the collection of her origami museum in Uruguay. Reading between the lines of translated missives discussing the foreword and my requests to her to show additional imagery, Mrs. Y did not seem thrilled with the notion and vetoed some of the imagery I wanted to show, but she didn’t outright kibosh the whole article. So, I rather doubt that she’d support x-raying and re-diagramming, but the appropriate avenue to pursue that would be to ask her, and then abide by her wishes. Robert
