"We may simply have lost our appreciation of hand-crafted goods." Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his whole life. His dad too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather 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 beginning of the Meiji era (1868 - 1912) Kanazawa voters have been purchasing Igarashi chochin from the store, in the heart 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 tiny workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan - there is evidence of them being employed in churches in the tenth century - and were used essentially as a movable method of lighting. Only often used within, they usually hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, prepared 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 traditional umbrellas his mainstay.
Making a chochin is a fiddly, fairly delicate procedure despite the attractively the attractively straightforward appearance of the end result. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, his bright eyes dead heavy, "patience and concentration." The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of roughly 2 a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some actually giant ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years - his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese measuring system ) in diameter with a complicated year of the rabbit design on it. The old lantern maker is pragmatic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today - he even sells them himself - but he is assured in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a nice thing, superior in some ways 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) whereas 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 goods. Price has become our main motivation as purchasers. We do not care to grasp 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 photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off stylish paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips slightly as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
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