“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his whole life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather 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 beginning of the Meiji era (1868 – 1912 ) Kanazawa voters 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 – vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan – there’s evidence of them being used in churches in the tenth century – and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they typically hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be postponed on a pole and carried before any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so generally 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 simple appearance of the end result. 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 thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 2 a day by one man including almost all of the painting. However some truly huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years – his largest was a matsuri monster measuring five 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 today – he even sells them himself – but he is confident in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a nice thing, superior in many 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 ) 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 products. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We do not 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 innumerable monochrome photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with robust, 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 will be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
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Tags: japan
