“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his full life. His pa too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in reality, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the start of the Meiji time ( 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 colour peppering the dusty confines of the little workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan – there is evidence of them being employed in temples in the tenth century – and were used essentially as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally 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 anybody going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so commonly used there would have been been around 40 or 50 chochin shops just in Kanazawa. These days 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 product. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at roughly thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of two a day by one man including most of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku (1 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 realistic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns these days – he even sells them himself – but he is assured in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely thing, superior in several paths 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 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 might have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We don’t care to understand how things were made these days, 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 countless monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with robust, 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 barely as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
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