Shops selling pots run from the shrine gate to the hill. In Kasama the workshops and galleries are strung along that line rather than gathered into a quarter, so the walk from the Inari shrine up to the kilns is the tour. The trade began as policy: the local lord set up official kilns at six places in his domain to encourage industry, and the making has continued in the area ever since, through several complete changes in what people wanted to buy. Very little about the present arrangement was planned; it accumulated.

One workshop keeps a climbing kiln more than a hundred and forty years old, still fired, still stacked by hand. A gallery in the town handles work by some five hundred and fifty makers from across the country, and another shows around eighty at any one time — which means that in a pottery town a good deal of the pottery on sale is from somewhere else. Mito is twenty minutes away by train, which puts this within reach of a city without making it a suburb of one. Properties with kilns attached come onto the market from time to time, which is why makers keep arriving from elsewhere and staying, and why the average age of the people working here is lower than the age of the trade.

Local ware displayed beside ware from everywhere else is not a dilution of the place. It is the opposite. It is a decision to be compared, which is a harder thing to do than it sounds: putting somebody else's bowl next to your own, on your own shelf, in your own town, and letting the customer pick up whichever one they prefer without saying anything about it.