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“We may simply have lost our appreciation for handmade goods.” Igarashi san has been making chochin paper lanterns in his little shop for his whole life. His pa too, and his grandfatherand great grandfather and even great, great granddad. The tools & plant that surround him today, in truth, have outlasted his ancestors, their wooden surfaces worn smooth with age. Since the beginning of the Meiji age ( 1868 - 1912) Kanazawa citizens 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 - vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the small workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a reasonably long history in Japan - there’s proof of them being employed in temples in the tenth century - and were used basically as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally used inside, they typically hung outside a home, temple or business or else in the entrance, prepared to be postponed 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 forty or 50 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 the attractively simple appearance of the end result. And, when asked what are the most important qualities in his profession Igarashi-san responses, his bright eyes dead major, “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 the majority of the painting. However some actually huge ones have left the Igarashi shop over the years - 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 these days - he even sells them himself - but he is confident 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 not be patched.” A paper lantern no matter 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 could have simply lost our appreciation for handmade products. Price has become our main incentive as customers. We don’t care to grasp how things were made these days, 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 innumerable monochrome photographs and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, thick arms and a fetching grin 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 family line making lanterns here.

For more information about travel and useful tips for tourists, visit famouswonders.com and check out Sensoji Temple.