“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 entire life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. The tools & hardware that surround him today, in truth, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the start of the Meiji age ( 1868 - 1912 ) Kanazawa citizens 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 beautifully decorated lanterns - vibrant bursts of color 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 temples in the tenth century - and were used primarily as a portable means of lighting. Only often used within, they traditionally hung outside a home, temple 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 have 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 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 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 most of the painting. However some truly huge 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 Eastern measuring system) in diameter with a complicated 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 knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in a number of 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’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 customers. We do not care to grasp 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 countless monochrome photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with robust, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a little as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
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