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Discover How Traditional Light Is Produced In Japan

By RomanticHeart | January 22, 2010

“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 pa 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 start of the Meiji age ( 1868 – 1912 ) Kanazawa citizens have been purchasing Igarashi chochin from the store, in the heart of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, close to the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with beautifully decorated lanterns – vibrant bursts of color peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan – there is evidence of them being employed in churches in the tenth century – and were used essentially as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they traditionally hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be postponed on a pole and carried before any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so generally used there would be been around 40 or fifty chochin shops just in Kanazawa. Nowadays there remain only himself and one other local craftsman in the trade and the other fellow (Matsuda-san) has long since diversified, making traditional 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 major, “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 actually giant ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku ( one shaku = 30.3cm in the old Eastern 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 lovely thing, superior in some 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 could have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main incentive as customers. We do not care to grasp how things were made these days, 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 photographs and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a little as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

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