One district, two lines of work: black and white. Miyama began as a settlement of potters, and kilns and galleries are still distributed along its road. Satsuma ware divides into kuro-satsuma and shiro-satsuma — the black made as everyday ware, the white as fine work supplied to the domain — and the division was in the purpose before it was in the appearance.

The clay comes out of the same ground for both. Changing how it is blended and how the glaze is applied produces vessels that a visitor would not guess had any common origin. Kagoshima city is about forty minutes away by car, and workshop premises with kilns come onto the market from time to time, so people do arrive from elsewhere and begin working here, which is not true of every ceramic district in the country. The settlement is said to have been founded by potters who came from Korea, and that origin survives in place names and in family names rather than in any monument.

Two lines surviving in one district is not the usual outcome. Because the uses were separate, the methods stayed separate, and when demand for one collapsed the other went on — so the district has stood on two legs through periods that closed down single-product towns entirely. Diversification is normally something a producing area attempts late, badly, and under pressure. Here it was built into the arrangement from the beginning, for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with resilience, and it is the reason the black and the white can still be set beside each other on the same shelf.