The legs of the chairs are bent rather than cut. Furniture in Hida is made using magewood — timber steamed and bent to shape — together with jointed construction, and the factories and showrooms are distributed around Furukawa and Takayama. Bending changes the form of a piece of wood without severing its fibres, so a bent component keeps its strength even when it has been made slender — which is exactly the combination a chair leg has to achieve, and the reason the technique exists at all.

Some of the factories will show the chair-making process from end to end, including the forms that the components are bent around and the order in which the individual parts are assembled. Hida is both a timber-producing region and a place with a long carpentry tradition, and the furniture industry sits on top of those two things rather than having been introduced from outside. Takayama is about fifteen minutes away by rail, there are jobs going in woodworking, and the town has its own shops and hospitals, so this is a working industry rather than a heritage one.

Making a component thin by cutting it and making it thin by bending it are not equivalent. Cutting severs the fibres and creates the line along which the piece will eventually fail; bending leaves them continuous, so a slender part remains difficult to break — and in furniture that carries a person's weight, that difference shows up as a difference in service life. A chair leg here looks too thin for its job. It holds because the wood was never cut through in making it.