The jewellery trade here began with polishing crystal out of the mountains. In the Chūō and Marunouchi blocks of Kōfu, jewellery workshops, wholesalers and retailers are concentrated in the middle of the city, and the small premises down the side streets are often setters — the people who fix stones into a mounting so that they stay fixed. Rock crystal was once quarried in the hills nearby. When the deposits stopped yielding, the polishing and setting skills stayed in the city even though the raw material had gone.

Close by are shops selling inden, deerskin patterned with lacquer laid onto the hide, so leather, lacquer and metal are all worked within the same few blocks. Kōfu station is near, the limited express reaches Shinjuku in about ninety minutes, and there are jobs in the jewellery trade, which is the practical measure of a producing district: whether a person can live here on handwork. Setting is invisible in the finished piece. Whether a stone comes loose in five years is decided at that stage, so the competence of the district shows up in the part of the object nobody looks at.

Districts built on a local material usually disappear when the material runs out. Kōfu did not, because what it actually dealt in was never the crystal itself but the hands that worked it — and hands travel less easily than stones do. Rough stone now arrives from everywhere in the world, and the place where it gets cut, polished and set has stayed exactly where it always was, a hundred kilometres from the nearest working mine and about ninety minutes by train from its largest market.