posted by ama on May 30
“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 full life. His dad too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in truth, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji era (1868 - 1912) Kanazawa voters have been purchasing 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 beautifully decorated lanterns - colourful spurts of color peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan - there’s evidence of them being employed in churches in the 10th century - and were used primarily as a movable method of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they usually hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready 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 generally used there would have been been around 40 or 50 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 standard 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 replies, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of about two a day by one man including most of the painting. However some truly huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over time - 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 knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in some ways 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 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 might have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main motivation as purchasers. We do not care to understand 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 robust, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips slightly as he tells us that he will be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
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