“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 pop too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. The tools & plant that surround him today, in fact, 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, near the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with superbly decorated lanterns - colourful spurts of color peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan - there’s proof of them being employed in churches in the tenth century - and were used essentially as a transportable method of lighting. Only often used within, they typically hung outside a home, temple 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 40 or fifty 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 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 roughly 2 a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some truly huge 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 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 certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely thing, superior in some 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 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 could have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main motivation as clients. We don’t care to understand 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 photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a little 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.
