“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 dad too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. 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 era (1868 – 1912 ) Kanazawa voters have been buying 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 beautifully decorated lanterns – colourful spurts 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 traditionally hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended on a pole and carried before anybody going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so generally used there would have been been around 40 or fifty chochin shops just in Kanazawa. These days 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 simple appearance of the end result. And, when asked what are the most vital qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of roughly 2 a day by one man including the majority of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over time – his biggest was a matsuri monster measuring five shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese measuring system) in diameter with an intricate year of the rabbit design on it. The old lantern maker is realistic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lanterns today – he even sells them himself – but he is assured in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely 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 may have simply lost our appreciation for handmade goods. 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 photographs and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with powerful, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off classy paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Humbly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips slightly as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.
Do you love to see the world? Want to see some of the best places in the world? Visit famouswonders.com to get an idea of where to go for your next vacation. Make sure to also check out Akashi Kaikyo Bridge facts.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
