Discover the Beauty of Japanese Latern Light

“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 father too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great grandfather. The tools & hardware that surround him today, in fact, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the start 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 fairly long history in Japan – there’s proof of them being employed in churches in the tenth century – and were used primarily as a movable method of lighting. Only often used inside, they usually hung outside a home, temple or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended 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 have been 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 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 roughly thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of about two 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 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 hard-headed 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 wonderful thing, superior in a number of ways to these garish modern impostors.

“You can fix 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 might have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We do not care to understand 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 pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, 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 touch as he tells us that he will be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

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