The shrine at the centre of this district is dedicated to a deity of papermaking. The Echizen washi villages lie along the Okamoto River in the area known as Goka — five settlements, Furō, Ōtaki, Iwamoto, Shinzaike and Sadatomo — with papermaking workshops distributed among them. The story told here is that Kawakami Gozen appeared upstream some fifteen hundred years ago and taught the five villages how to make paper. The shrine to her, Okamoto Jinja, is listed in the Engishiki register of 926, and the lower shrine building, rebuilt in 1843, is an Important Cultural Property.

The spring festival in May is known as the Festival of the Deity and the Paper and is designated an intangible folk cultural property by the prefecture. There is documentary support for the age of the district as well: the Echizen provincial tax ledger of 730, preserved in the Shōsōin, is counted among the oldest surviving paper made in Echizen. The centre of Echizen city is about twenty minutes away by car, and notices seeking successors to take on papermaking are posted locally, so a story measured in fifteen centuries and a recruitment note sit in the same village.

The shrine is not here because paper was worshipped. When households doing identical work live in one valley, they need somewhere to settle disputes and to agree what counts as a proper tool, and the ground in front of a shrine is where that gets done. The trade organised itself around the shrine for practical reasons, and the shrine acquired its papermaking deity from the trade. That the museum and the hands-on workshop now stand in the same row is simply the next step in an old sequence.