Learn About Japanese Culture and How Light Is Made In Ancient Time

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June 24th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his full life. His father too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great grandfather. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in reality, 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 guts of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, near the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with beautifully decorated lanterns – vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan – there’s evidence of them being used in temples in the 10th century – and were used primarily as a transportable method of lighting. Only often used inside, they typically hung outside a place, church 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 one time they were so generally used there would have been been around forty or fifty chochin shops just in Kanazawa. Nowadays 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 important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, his bright eyes dead heavy, “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 most of the painting. However some truly huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years – his biggest 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 some 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 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 might have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main motivation as customers. We do not 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 photos 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. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips slightly as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

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