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“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his whole life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. The tools & plant that surround him today, in truth, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji time ( 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 beautifully decorated lanterns - vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the little workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan - there’s proof of them being employed in churches in the 10th century - and were used essentially as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they customarily hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended on a pole and carried before any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so widely used there would be been around 40 or fifty 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 traditional umbrellas his mainstay.
Making a chochin is a fiddly, fairly delicate procedure despite the attractively simple appearance of the end result. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead heavy, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at about 30 cm across, can be produced at a rate of 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 five 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 hard-headed about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today - 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 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 regardless of how well made lasts only about a year (natural beauty is always fleeting) whereas 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 motivation as purchasers. We do not 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 smile showing off elegant 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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