“We may simply have lost our appreciation of hand-crafted goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his whole life. His pa too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. The tools & plant that surround him today, in reality, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the start of the Meiji age ( 1868 - 1912 ) Kanazawa citizens have been purchasing Igarashi chochin from the store, in the heart of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, near 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’s evidence of them being employed in temples in the 10th century - and were used basically as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they traditionally hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended on a pole and carried before anyone going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so widely used there would be been around 40 or 50 chochin shops just in Kanazawa. Today 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 simple appearance of the end product. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at roughly thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 2 a day by one man including almost all of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years - his largest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku ( one 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 pragmatic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns these days - he even sells them himself - but he is confident in the understanding that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely thing, superior in a number of 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 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 might have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main motivation 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 innumerable monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a little as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
If you find this article useful, you may also visit famouswonders.com to read more about some of the best places to visit and have a look at Sensoji Temple.
Tags: japan