Casseroles and teapots, from the same district. The Banko kilns in Yokkaichi make two things principally: donabe, which go directly onto a flame, and kyūsu, the small teapots whose value lies in how cleanly they pour and how precisely the lid seats in its rim. These are quite different demands — one is about surviving thermal shock, the other about accuracy at the spout — and almost nothing about them overlaps in either the making or the testing. A single district produces both because the clay bodies have been formulated separately for each purpose over a long period of trial. The displays at the Banko no Sato hall make the difference legible in the weight and in the surface, once you know to look for it and are told what to look for.

The unglazed teapots take on the tea over years, which is the point of buying one. Painting and wheel work can both be tried on site by anyone who turns up. Kintetsu reaches Nagoya in about half an hour, and the area's chemical and automotive plants mean employment options here are considerably broader than in most pottery towns, which changes who stays.

That one clay source yields both a vessel for fire and a vessel for hot water is not a small achievement. The clay is worked with a proportion of petalite, which is what allows a pot to go over a flame without cracking, and this is the sort of technical fact that decides whether an entire district survives. Yokkaichi is an industrial city and the kilns sit inside that rather than apart from it. Nobody here treats pottery as a rural craft, because it is not one. That range is where the district's real durability lies.