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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 full life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great grandfather. The tools & plant 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 citizens have been purchasing 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 beautifully decorated lanterns – colourful spurts of color peppering the dusty confines of the little workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan – there is evidence of them being used in temples in the tenth century – and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they customarily hung outside a home, 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 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 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 heavy, “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 most of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his largest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 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 realistic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns these days – he even sells them himself – but he is confident in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a nice 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 ) 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 customers. We don’t care to know how things were made nowadays, 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 innumerable monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off stylish paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips a touch as he tells us that he will be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

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