You knead clay in a town of chimneys. Tokoname is one of the Six Ancient Kilns of Japan, a pottery town with a thousand years of history, where the slopes bristle with kiln chimneys and the walls are built from old clay pipes and jars. The whole place seems to be made of fired earth. You turn the wheel, and the red Tokoname clay rises in your hands—the same iron-rich earth that makes the town's famous shudei teapots, the unglazed red-clay vessels said to improve the taste of green tea. The clay here has a character all its own, warm and ferrous, and it answers your fingers as it has answered potters' fingers for ten centuries. Walk the Pottery Road that winds through the old district and you find shards underfoot, jars embedded in the garden walls, the whole town a kind of living museum of its single craft. This is a place that has lived with clay for a thousand years, that has shaped its very streets from what it makes. To sit at a wheel here and raise a small bowl from the red earth is to add your own brief gesture to that immense, unbroken span of making.