“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 entire life. His father too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great granddad. 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 era (1868 – 1912 ) Kanazawa voters 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 fairly long history in Japan – there’s proof of them being used in temples in the 10th century – and were used basically as a movable method of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they typically hung outside a home, 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 commonly used there would have been around 40 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 standard 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 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 about two a day by one man including almost all of the painting. However some truly huge 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 Eastern measuring system) in diameter with an intricate year of the rabbit design on it. The old lantern maker is pragmatic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today – he even sells them himself – but he is confident in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely thing, superior in some 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 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 goods. Price has become our main motivation as purchasers. We do not 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 countless monochrome photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips barely as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

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