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 little shop for his full life. His father too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. The tools & hardware that surround him today, in truth, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji age ( 1868 - 1912 ) Kanazawa voters have been buying Igarashi chochin from the store, in the guts of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, close to the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with superbly decorated lanterns - vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.
Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan - there’s evidence of them being used in temples in the tenth century - and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only often used within, they typically hung outside a house, temple 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 a previous point they were so generally used there would be been around forty 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 traditional 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 responses, 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 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 (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 hard-headed about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today - he even sells them himself - but he is assured in the knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in several paths 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 not 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 may have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We don’t care to understand 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 pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off stylish paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips slightly as he tells us that he will be the last of his family line making lanterns here.
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