“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small shop for his whole life. His pop too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in reality, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the start of the Meiji time ( 1868 - 1912) Kanazawa citizens have been purchasing 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 churches in the 10th century - and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they traditionally hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be postponed on a pole and carried before anyone going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so generally used there would have been been around 40 or 50 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 responses, his bright eyes dead heavy, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at roughly thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of roughly 2 a day by one man including most of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years - his largest was a matsuri monster measuring five 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 knowledge that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in several paths 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 not 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 products. Price has become our main incentive as customers. We don’t 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 innumerable 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. 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 folks line making lanterns here.

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