My name is Jeff. I have been a lantern maker in Ibaraki for the past seven years.

My job is to make what we call the fire bag. I specialize in making big lanterns. In short, I just make the shell of the lantern. Once my job is completed it is sent off to a wholesaler where the painting and final touches are put on the lantern and then sold. I don’t do any direct sales.

How did I get into this line work? My father-in-law was making lanterns for over 40 years until his retirement two years ago. Around 2016 he was starting to talk about retirement and as we got talking, he spoke about how less and less people are doing this kind of work. I have always been interested in working with my hands and enjoyed diy work and my hobby was making stained glass. So, this was a good chance for me to do something that would be interesting. The more we talked, the more appealing it became to me and in 2017 I took the plunge and started in this new life.

The lantern making process

I’ll walk you through the process of my job.

The first step is to cut bamboo into the necessary length and then I splice it into strips.

The next step is to remove the nodes that stick out and at the same time fix the required thickness of the strips. Originally this was done by hand but my father-in-law bought a machine many years ago to do this part.

Once that is done I need to cut the strips into the necessary width. This is determined by the size of the lantern. The bigger the lantern, the wider the strips need to be to offer better support. When I started this was done by hand which was a long and painstaking process. To reduce our workload and improved time efficiency we commissioned a machine to do this process. It has been a wonderful addition to the workshop!

The final step is to take the skin off the bamboo strips using a kanna. If this isn’t done the glue won’t stick to the bamboo.

Now I can start making the lantern. The cut bamboo strips are joined together using small washi strips and then using my hands I bend them into a circle as cleanly as possible. It’s important for the bamboo to be as clean a circle as possible so the lantern isn’t deko boko.

Next the bamboo is put onto the frame, tightened and then string is attached to hold it all together. The last step is glue the washi onto the bamboo. Once it is dried overnight, the mould can be removed and the lantern folded ready for shipping. And that’s it.

The actual process of making lanterns is not difficult but doing it well is difficult. I think this is the same for any kind of craft.

I often get asked how long it takes to make a lantern. From making getting the bamboo ready to shipping the lantern it depends on the size of the lantern. The smallest one takes 2 days and the biggest one takes at least a week.

The learning curve

As with everything new, learning to make lanterns was a long and arduous journey. Each step of the process has its difficulties that I had to overcome. The first was splitting the bamboo evenly. If the bamboo is split evenly, it is easier to use because each lantern needs a different width. So if I split it into ten but not evenly I will have 7 very large strips and 3 very thin ones instead of them all being about the same. After lots of trial and error it clicked together. I often compare it to learning to drive a manual car. Clutch control is the most difficult part but once get how to do it the rest is easy!

One more challenge for me was aligning the bamboo strips on the frame. A well-made lantern evenly spaced bamboo strips. Some of our moulds have markers to help with this but some of the moulds are a bit old and the markers don’t match so we have to space the strips by eye coordination. When I’m walking around and see lanterns, this is the first thing I look at to see whether it is well made or not.