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

Chochin lanterns have a fairly long history in Japan - there's evidence of them being used in temples in the 10th century - and were used essentially as a portable means of lighting. Only often used inside, they traditionally hung outside a place, church or business or else in the entrance, ready to be postponed on a pole and carried before any one going out at night. Igarashi-san reckons that at a previous point they were so generally used there would have 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 traditional 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 roughly 2 a day by one man including most of the painting. However some truly 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 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 today - he even sells them himself - but he is confident in the certainty that a well-made paper lantern is a lovely thing, superior in many ways to these garish modern impostors.

"You can fix 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 motivation as clients. We don't care to know 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 pictures and press clippings showing a proud, broad-shouldered young man with strong, thick arms and a fetching smile showing off elegant paper spheres with matsuri lights glimmering in the background. Politely showing us them, his warm, friendly smile only slips barely as he tells us that he is going to be the last of his folks line making lanterns here.

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