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“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little 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 fact, 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 heart of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, near the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with superbly decorated lanterns – colourful spurts of color peppering the dusty confines of the little workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan – there’s proof 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 typically hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready 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 have been been around forty or fifty chochin shops just in Kanazawa. Today 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 major, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at about 30 cm across, can be produced at a rate of about two a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years – his largest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese 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 understanding that a well-made paper lantern is a nice 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’t 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 customers. We do not care to understand how things were made nowadays, 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 photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips slightly as he tells us that he will be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

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