Kilns and shops in one block. The Kutani ceramics village gathers the workshops that do the overglaze painting and the places that sell the results into a single area you can cross on foot in a few minutes. Because the colour goes on after the first firing, you can see the same form at three stages side by side: the plain white body, the pigment as it is laid down, and the fired piece with its colours entirely changed from what the painter was looking at. The difference in the reds before and after firing is the thing that surprises almost everyone exactly once. Painters work from memory of the finished colour rather than from what is in front of them, which is the whole difficulty of the technique.

The museum holds older Kutani work, so the current kilns can be compared directly against what they descend from without leaving the site or driving anywhere. Komatsu airport and a Shinkansen station are close, Kanazawa is about forty minutes away by rail, and the practical business of living is handled locally without difficulty. This is not a showy destination and does not present itself as one.

Differences between kilns are invisible until the pieces are standing next to each other on the same shelf in the same light. Making that comparison usually costs a day of driving between workshops. Kutani has a long gap in its history — production stopped for a century and was revived — and the pieces from before and after that gap are visibly different. The five colours are thick enough to feel with a fingertip. Nomi is a working town rather than a scenic one, and the village sits inside it plainly. Here it has already been done for you, which is the whole value of the place.