Understand the History of Light in Japan
“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 father 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 start of the Meiji time ( 1868 – 1912) Kanazawa citizens have been buying Igarashi chochin from the store, in the guts of old Kanazawa’s merchant district, near the back of the castle. The shelves are stacked high with beautifully 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 inside, they customarily hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended 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 be 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 simple appearance of the end product. And, when asked what are the most vital qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead serious, “patience and concentration.” The average sized lantern according to Igarashi-san, at roughly thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 2 a day by one man including most 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 Eastern measuring system) in diameter with a complicated 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 certainty 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’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 goods. Price has become our main incentive as clients. We do not care to grasp how things were made nowadays, 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 powerful, thick arms and a fetching grin showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely 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.
If you enjoy traveling and would like to read more on some of the most famous places in the world, visit famouswonders.com and also check out Mount Fuji pictures.
Tags: japan
Travel Tips | admin | 
May 12, 2009 12:45 am
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