In the movie Pearl Harbor, you notice that Rave give the origami Swan to the nurse. But, people in the United States only learned about origami after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Origami was only orginally discovered in the year 1956.
Maybe someone from Japan came to the US and taught someone there how and they were related to Rafe and that's how he knew. Maybe they kept it a secret until 1956.
So Oragami didn't "come out" until then. Still maybe he learned how to do it. This movie was awesome. Josh Hartnett was SO hot. And I think its sad how you people can come online and criticise the tiniest of things. Like the fact that one minute her hair was up and the next it wasn't. Use common sense and think about it before you post it. I come on here to read these things and see what people found in good movies and put GOOD ones that I found. But some of these are just plain stupid.
Maybe it wasn't exactly origami. Rafe could have just folded the birds himself it doesn't have to be origami. And anyways who cares because that movie is so good and Ben Affleck is so hot and an awesome actor (the best!) so it doesn't matter
Rafe said that it took him 6 hours to make the cranes. This could mean that he was playing with paper and made up the crane idea on his own, and indeed didn't know about origami.