Puntogf Antiques.

Meiji Japanese

Learn About Japanese Culture and How Light Is Made In Ancient Time

"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 full life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great grandfather. The tools & plant 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 citizens 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 - colourful spurts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan - there's evidence of them being employed in temples in the 10th century - and were used essentially as a movable method of lighting. Only often used inside, they traditionally hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, prepared 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 be 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 traditional umbrellas his mainstay.

Making a chochin is a fiddly, fairly delicate procedure despite the attractively simple appearance of the end product. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, 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 roughly 2 a day by one man including almost all of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years - his largest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku ( one 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 nice thing, superior in a number of 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'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 may have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Price has become our main motivation as clients. We do not 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 innumerable monochrome photos and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with robust, 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 slightly as he tells us that he's going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

About the Author

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