“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 pop too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. 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 citizens have been buying 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 beautifully decorated lanterns – colourful spurts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan – there’s evidence of them being used in churches in the 10th century – and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only often used inside, they traditionally hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be postponed 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 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 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 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 roughly 2 a day by one man including most of the painting. However some actually giant ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five 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 wonderful 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’t be patched.” A paper lantern no matter 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 may have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We don’t 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 innumerable monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with robust, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips a little as he tells us that he is going to 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 Akashi Kaikyo Bridge facts.
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