“We may simply have lost our appreciation of hand-crafted goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his full life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in fact, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji age ( 1868 – 1912) Kanazawa citizens have been buying Igarashi chochin from the store, in the heart of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, close to the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with superbly decorated lanterns – vibrant bursts of color peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan – there is evidence of them being employed in temples in the 10th century – and were used basically as a movable method of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they traditionally hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be suspended on a pole and carried before anybody going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so widely used there would be been around 40 or 50 chochin shops just in Kanazawa. Nowadays there remain only himself and one other local craftsman in the trade and the other fellow (Matsuda-san) has long since diversified, making traditional umbrellas his mainstay.

Making a chochin is a fiddly, fairly delicate procedure despite the attractively the attractively straightforward appearance of the end product. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of about two a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his largest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese measuring system ) in diameter with an intricate year of the rabbit design on it. The old lantern maker is hard-headed about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today – he even sells them himself – but he is assured in the knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in many ways to these garish modern impostors.

“You can fix a good chochin,” he tells us, “you can replace one rib or fix a hole in the paper no problem.” “Plastic lanterns have no internal frame and can not be patched.” A paper lantern regardless of how well made lasts only about a year ( natural beauty is always fleeting ) while a plastic one might last twice that and cost half as much. On top of that, we as a society could have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main motivation as purchasers. We do not care to understand how things were made nowadays, or who made them, or else Igarashisan would be the wealthy head of a chain of shops.

The walls of the Igarashi Chochinya and his ready-to-hand scrapbook sport countless monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips slightly as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

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Tags: japan

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