Learn More About Japanese Heritage Through Latern Light
“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 granddad and even great, great granddad. The tools & hardware that surround him today, in fact, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the start of the Meiji age ( 1868 – 1912 ) Kanazawa voters 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 beautifully decorated lanterns – colourful spurts of color peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan – there’s evidence of them being employed in temples in the 10th century – and were used primarily as a portable means of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they usually hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, ready to be suspended on a pole and carried before anybody 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 result. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, 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 about two a day by one man including most of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese 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 knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in many 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 could have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main motivation as purchasers. We don’t 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 pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with robust, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips slightly as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
For more information about travel and useful tips for tourists, visit famouswonders.com and check out Meiji Mura Japan.
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