Learn About Japanese Latern in The Making
“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his whole life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great granddad. 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 time ( 1868 – 1912) Kanazawa citizens 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 color peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan – there is evidence of them being used in temples in the tenth century – and were used basically as a transportable method of lighting. Only often used inside, they customarily hung outside a home, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be postponed on a pole and carried before anyone going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so widely 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 traditional umbrellas his mainstay.
Making a chochin is a fiddly, fairly delicate procedure despite the attractively simple appearance of the end product. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead major, “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 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 ( 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 hard-headed 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 understanding that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely thing, superior in several paths 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 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 goods. Price has become our main incentive as customers. We do not care to know how things were made these days, 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 countless monochrome photographs and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, 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 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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