Traveling Tweets

“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 whole life. His father too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great grandfather. The tools & equipment that surround him today, in fact, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji age ( 1868 - 1912) Kanazawa voters have been purchasing 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 superbly decorated lanterns - colourful spurts of color peppering the dusty confines of the tiny workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan - there is evidence of them being employed in temples in the 10th century - and were used primarily as a transportable method of lighting. Only often used within, they typically hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be suspended on a pole and carried before anybody going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so widely used there would have been been around forty 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 standard 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 vital qualities in his profession Igarashi-san replies, his bright eyes dead heavy, “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 actually huge 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 a complicated 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 these days - he even sells them himself - but he is assured in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a wonderful thing, superior in some 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) 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 motivation as purchasers. 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 robust, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off stylish paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly grin only slips a touch as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

For more information about travel and useful tips for tourists, visit famouswonders.com and check out Japan suspension bride.

Technorati Tags: japan