Find the Light of Japan 353641041769
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"We may only have lost our appreciation for handmade goods." Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his small go shopping for his whole life. His father also, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and also great, great grandfather. The tools & gear that surround him today, actually, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the start of the Meiji period (1868 - 1912) Kanazawa individuals have already been getting Igarashi chochin from the store, in the heart of old Kanazawa's business district, near the back of the castle. The shelves are piled high with beautifully decorated lamps - radiant bursts of color peppering the dusty confines of the little workshop.
Chochin lamps have a fairly long history in Japan - there's proof of them being used in temples in the 10th century - and were used primarily as a portable means of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they usually hung outside a residence, temple or company or else in the entrance, prepared to be suspended on a and carried before anyone heading out during the night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they certainly were so popular there would have been around 40 or 50 chochin retailers only in Kanazawa. In these days there remain only himself try чешский бисер and one other local builder in the other man and the business (Matsuda-san) has long since diversified, making conventional umbrellas his principal.
Building a chochin is a fiddly, fairly sensitive method despite the beautifully simple appearance of the finish product. And, when asked what're the most crucial features in his career his bright eyes dead serious, "patience and concentration" are replied, by Igarashi-san. The average measured lantern according to Igarashi-san, at about 30 cm across, can be developed at an interest rate of about two each day by one person including most of the painting. However some really big ones have gone the Igarashi store over the years - his greatest was a matsuri beast measuring 5 shaku (1 shaku = 30.3cm in the old Japanese measuring system) in length with an complicated year of the rabbit design onto it. The old lantern producer is realistic about the fact that people want cheaper, mass-produced, plastic covered lamps these times - he even carries them himself - but he's confident in the information that a well-made paper lantern is really a wonderful thing, excellent in lots of ways to these garish contemporary impostors.
"You can fix a good chochin," we are told by him, "you can replace one rib or fix a hole in the report no problem." "Plastic lanterns have no inner body and can't be patched." A paper lantern regardless of how well made lasts just about per year (pure beauty is always fleeting) whereas a plastic one might last twice that and cost half just as much. Together with that, we as a community could have only lost our appreciation for handmade goods. Cost is now our major inspiration as consumers. We do not care to understand how things were made nowadays, or who made them, or else Igarashisan is the prosperous head of a string of shops.
The partitions of the Igarashi Chochinya and his ready-to-hand scrapbook activity innumerable monochrome pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered son with strong, heavy hands and a fetching smile showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the backdrop. Humbly demonstrating us them, his warm, friendly smile only falls somewhat as he tells us that he will be the last of his family line making lamps here.
