“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 pa too, and his grandfatherand great granddad 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 era (1868 - 1912) Kanazawa voters have been purchasing Igarashi chochin from the store, in the guts 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 reasonably long history in Japan - there’s evidence of them being used in temples in the tenth century - and were used essentially as a portable means 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 any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so commonly used there would be been around forty 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 simple appearance of the end result. And, when asked what are the most vital qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at about 30 cm across, can be produced at a rate of about two 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 biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku ( one shaku = 30.3cm in the old Eastern 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 confident in the knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in several paths 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’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 goods. Price has become our main incentive as purchasers. We don’t care to know 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 innumerable monochrome photos 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. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips barely as he tells us that he will be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
If you enjoy traveling and would like to read more on some of the most famous places in the world, visit famouswonders.com and also check out Sensoji Temple.
Tags: japan
