“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his full life. His father too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. 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 era (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 beautifully decorated lanterns - vibrant bursts of color peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan - there’s proof of them being employed in churches in the tenth century - and were used basically as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they typically hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be postponed on a pole and carried before any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so widely used there would have been 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 standard umbrellas his mainstay.
Making a chochin is a fiddly, fairly delicate procedure despite 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 major, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 2 a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years - his largest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku (1 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 hard-headed 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 knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a nice thing, superior in many ways to these garish modern impostors.
“You can correct 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 may have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We don’t care to grasp how things were made nowadays, or who made them, or else Igarashisan would be the prosperous head of a chain of shops.
The walls of the Igarashi Chochinya and his ready-to-hand scrapbook sport innumerable monochrome photographs 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 smile only slips a little as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
For more information about travel and useful tips for tourists, visit famouswonders.com and check out Fuji mountain.
Tags: japan