Travel Adventure & Trekking Blog

“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 whole life. His father 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 start of the Meiji time ( 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 superbly 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 tenth century - and were used primarily as a movable method of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they traditionally hung outside a place, church 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 a previous point they were so widely used there would be been around forty or fifty 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 the attractively straightforward 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 about 30 cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 2 a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over time - his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Eastern measuring system) in diameter with an intricate 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 lovely thing, superior in many 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 no matter 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 may have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main incentive as purchasers. 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 countless monochrome photos 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. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips slightly as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

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