"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 entire life. His dad too, and his grandfatherand great granddad and even great, great granddad. 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 time ( 1868 - 1912) Kanazawa voters have been purchasing 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 superbly decorated lanterns - vibrant bursts of colour peppering the dusty confines of the little workshop.

Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan - there is evidence of them being used in temples in the tenth century - and were used primarily as a transportable method of lighting. Only occasionally used within, they customarily hung outside a house, temple or business or else in the entrance, ready to be suspended on a pole and carried before any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at one time they were so generally used there would be been around 40 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 straightforward appearance of the end result. 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 thirty cm across, can be produced at a rate of approximately 2 a day by one man including almost all of the painting. However some really massive ones have left the Igarashi shop over time - his largest was a matsuri monster measuring 5 shaku ( one 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 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 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 not 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 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 countless 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. Modestly showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips a touch as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his family line making lanterns here.

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