“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his entire life. His father too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great grandfather. The tools & hardware that surround him today, in reality, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji time ( 1868 – 1912) Kanazawa voters have been buying 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 superbly decorated lanterns – vibrant bursts of color peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan – there’s evidence of them being employed in churches in the 10th century – and were used essentially as a movable method of lighting. Only often used within, they usually hung outside a home, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be postponed on a pole and carried before anybody going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so generally 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 standard umbrellas his mainstay.

Making a chochin is a fiddly, fairly delicate procedure despite the attractively the attractively straightforward appearance of the end product. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at thirty 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 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 realistic 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 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’t 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 might have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. 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 prosperous 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 stylish paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips a touch as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

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Tags: Amp Hardware, Ancestors, Ancient Time, Bright Eyes, Confines, Craftsman, Delicate Procedure, Fiddly, Granddad, Great Grandfather, Guts, Handmade Goods, Home Temple, japan, Japanese Culture, Mainstay, Matsuda, Merchant District, Umbrellas, Vibrant Bursts, Wooden Surfaces