“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 pa too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great grandfather. The tools & hardware that surround him today, in reality, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji era (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 fairly long history in Japan – there’s proof of them being employed in temples in the tenth century – and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they usually 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 around 40 or 50 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 simple 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 approximately 2 a day by one man including almost all of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese measuring system) in diameter with a complicated 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 these days – he even sells them himself – but he is confident in the knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a nice thing, superior in a number of 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’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 could have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We don’t care to know 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 countless monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips barely as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

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