Seto, Aichi

The terminal station at Owari-Seto was built in the shape of a climbing kiln — a deliberate gesture, but not an empty one. The whole town earns it. Seto's relationship with fired clay goes back to the tenth century, through the ancient kilns of the Sanage kiln cluster, through the medieval refinements of the Koseto style, through a ceramics tradition so pervasive that the Japanese word for pottery itself — *setomono* — carries the city's name. Walking the streets near the station, that history is not displayed so much as embedded: in the slope of a roof, in a shop window stacked with glazed ware, in the covered arcade of Seto Suehirocho, where roughly a hundred small shops continue their weekday commerce under a single roof.

In September, the Setomono Festival turns the streets into an open-air market, with kilns and dealers selling directly to whoever shows up. The rest of the year moves more quietly. The Aichi Prefectural Ceramics Museum holds the longer view — its buildings organized around ancient kiln sites, including a preserved tenth-century anagama from the Heian period at the Kiln History Museum. Akazu-yaki, a distinct local tradition, has its own exhibition hall and workshop space in the Akazu district. Alongside the pottery, the town produces *Seto shoyu yakisoba* — noodles grilled with soy sauce — and the forests of Kaisho-no-Mori, some six hundred hectares of satoyama with small wetlands scattered through the canopy, offer a different register entirely.

Seto is not a museum town sealed off from change. The site of the 2005 Aichi Expo now functions as a park and conservation area. Research facilities for advanced ceramics and industrial science operate near the city's western edge. The old craft and the newer industrial applications of ceramic technology coexist without much ceremony, which is perhaps the most honest thing about the place.