Understand Some Japanese Culture Through Latern and Light

“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade 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 & plant that surround him today, in fact, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji time ( 1868 - 1912) Kanazawa voters have been buying 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 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 used in churches in the 10th century - and were used primarily as a portable means of lighting. Only often used within, they typically hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, prepared 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 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 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 serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at about 30 cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 2 a day by one man including almost all of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over time - his biggest 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 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 understanding that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in many 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 not be patched.” A paper lantern no matter how well made lasts only about a year (natural beauty is always fleeting) whereas 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 purchasers. We do not care to grasp 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 pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips a little as he tells us that he will be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

To read more about travel topics, visit famouswonders.com and while you are at it, check out Akashi Kaikyo Bridge.