Aligning the hairs is done almost entirely with the fingertips. Kumano is a brush-making town: there is a dedicated museum and workshop centre, and you can also watch brushes being made at working ateliers, both cosmetic brushes and writing brushes. Making the hosaki — the head of the brush — means blending hairs of different lengths so that the tips come together at one point, then binding the root with thread, and it is still the part of the process that machines have not managed to take over.

Hair quality varies by animal and by the part of the animal it came from, so the material has to be sorted before anything can be built with it, and the fineness of that sorting is very nearly the whole of what a brush costs. Hiroshima's city centre is about forty minutes away by car, and job listings in brush making appear throughout the year, so the district still functions as a place to be employed rather than only as a place to visit. Kumano makes writing brushes and cosmetic brushes both; more of the cosmetic ones leave the country.

A brush wears differently depending on who is holding it. The same brush loses its point in a different place according to how the user presses, so the maker, who will never meet the user, is aiming at a shape that will wear evenly for an unknown hand. That is a strange target to work toward, and it explains where the labour in this trade actually goes. Most of the effort spent sorting hair is spent constructing that average, hair by hair, for a hand nobody in the workshop will ever see at work.