The sound of wood being turned mixes into the sound of the river. Yamanaka Onsen sits in a valley in Kaga, and along the river are workshops where bowl blanks are turned on the lathe, together with a lacquerware museum and a row of galleries. The district is described as having four hundred and fifty years of history, and it has long been known as Yamanaka of the woodturning, counted alongside Wajima and Kanazawa as a producing centre in its own right.

Lacquer here is divided among specialists: the turner who shapes the blank, the ground-coat maker, the lacquerer, the maki-e decorator. A single bowl passes through several pairs of hands before it is finished, and no one of them makes a whole object. Yamanaka took the woodturning end of that division for reasons that are geographical rather than commercial — timber on the slopes above, water in the river below — so the map of who does what in this region is also a map of what the land provides. The workshops are within walking distance of the bathing street, close enough that some visitors look into the same shop twice, once before the bath and once after.

Kaga-Onsen station is twenty minutes away by car, the work here is turning and innkeeping, and snow settles in winter. Guests who came for a long cure bought a bowl to take home, and that pattern ran for long enough that the craft district and the hot spring were never really two separate economies. They have simply been kept at the distance described in the first line: near enough that the lathe is hard to pick out from the water.