The rock walls stand around the village like a folding screen. Ōkawachiyama is a settlement of kilns under those cliffs, twenty-nine of them along a stone-paved slope. Through the Edo period this was the official kiln of the Saga domain, producing porcelain presented to the imperial court, to the shogunal house and to other daimyō — work made to a standard set by the recipient rather than by the market, which is a different discipline entirely.

The valley has one narrow entrance and hills on every other side, and that geography is said to have served a second purpose: keeping the methods from leaving. Production stopped when the domains were abolished in 1871, and the Imaizumi Imaemon house rebuilt it as a modern craft rather than as a continuation of the old arrangement. A climbing kiln survives at the domain kiln park. Imari's town centre is about fifteen minutes away by car, and the kilns are looking for successors.

A valley enclosed for the sake of secrecy now works as a walking route. When a settlement has only one way in, the order of a visit is decided for you: go up the slope and come back down, and you will have passed all twenty-nine workshops without needing to plan anything. The landform that was meant to keep people out has become the mechanism for showing them round. Nothing was redesigned to achieve that, and nothing needed to be. The purpose reversed completely while the shape of the place stayed exactly as it was, which is a more common outcome in old industrial settlements than deliberate conversion is.