“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his entire life. His dad too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. 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 era (1868 – 1912 ) Kanazawa citizens have been purchasing Igarashi chochin from the store, in the guts of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, near the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with beautifully decorated lanterns – vibrant bursts of color peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan – there is evidence of them being used in churches in the tenth century – and were used essentially as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they traditionally hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, prepared 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 have 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 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 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 almost all of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku ( one 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 today – he even sells them himself – but he is confident in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a nice thing, superior in a number of 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 ) 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 goods. Price has become our main motivation as clients. We don’t care to know 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 countless monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off stylish paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a touch as he tells us that he’s going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

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