“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 full life. His pa too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in fact, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji age ( 1868 - 1912 ) Kanazawa citizens have been purchasing 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 - colourful spurts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan - there’s proof of them being used in churches in the 10th century - and were used essentially as a movable method of lighting. Only often used within, they traditionally hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended on a pole and carried before anybody going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so widely used there would have been around 40 or fifty chochin shops just in Kanazawa. Today 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 simple appearance of the end product. And, when asked what are the most vital qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead major, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at roughly thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 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 largest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku ( one 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 certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a nice thing, superior in a number of ways 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 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 products. Price has become our main incentive as customers. We don’t care to understand 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 photographs and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a touch as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
Do you enjoy reading this? If yes, you may also visit famouswonders.com to read more about some of the best places to visit in the world and have a look at Akashi Kaikyo Bridge Japan.
Tags: japan
