“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his entire life. His father too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in reality, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji time ( 1868 – 1912 ) Kanazawa voters have been purchasing 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 beautifully decorated lanterns – vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan – there’s proof of them being used in temples in the tenth century – and were used essentially as a movable method of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they typically hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, ready to be postponed on a pole and carried before anybody going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so generally used there would be been around forty or fifty chochin shops just in Kanazawa. These days there remain only himself and one other local craftsman in the trade and the other fellow (Matsuda-san) has long since diversified, making standard 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 vital qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead heavy, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at roughly 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 truly huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku ( one shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese measuring system ) in diameter with a complicated year of the rabbit design on it. The old lantern maker is realistic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today – he even sells them himself – but he is assured in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely thing, superior in a number of ways to these garish modern impostors.
“You can repair 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’t be patched.” A paper lantern no matter 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 may have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main incentive as customers. We don’t care to know how things were made these days, 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 robust, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off stylish paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips slightly as he tells us that he will be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
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