PROFILE
Rudge Jeff
A lantern maker born in Switzerland and raised in France.
He came to Japan in 2005 after marrying his wife whom he met while traveling.
He started working at Iijima Kousakusho, a lantern-making workshop in Naka City, Ibaraki Prefecture, which was established by his father-in-law, in 2017 and took over the workshop in 2021. Currently, he makes large lanterns and festival fans by himself.
His hobbies include golf, soccer, stained glass and glass fusion making, and making lanterns as a side project.
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 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!
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!
Share Article
RELATED ARTICLES
