“We may simply have lost our appreciation of hand-crafted goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his entire life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather 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 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 beautifully decorated lanterns - vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan - there is evidence of them being used in churches in the 10th century - and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only often used within, they typically hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, ready to be suspended on a pole and carried before any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so widely 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 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 thirty 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 time - his largest 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 hard-headed about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns these days - he even sells them himself - but he is assured 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 regardless of 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 might have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main incentive as purchasers. We don’t 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 countless monochrome photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a touch as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

For more information about travel and useful tips for tourists, visit famouswonders.com and check out Mount Fiji.

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