“We may simply have lost our appreciation of hand-crafted goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his entire life. His pa too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. 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 era (1868 – 1912) Kanazawa voters have been purchasing Igarashi chochin from the store, in the guts 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 reasonably long history in Japan – there’s evidence of them being used in churches in the tenth century – and were used primarily as a transportable method of lighting. Only often used inside, they typically hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended on a pole and carried before anyone going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so widely used there would be been around 40 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 product. And, when asked what are the most vital qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, 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 approximately 2 a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku (1 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 hard-headed about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today – he even sells them himself – but he is assured in the knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a nice thing, superior in several paths 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 not be patched.” A paper lantern no matter 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 clients. 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 countless monochrome photographs and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with robust, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely 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.
For more information about travel and useful tips for tourists, visit famouswonders.com and check out Asakusa Temple.
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