The sound of paper being made is hard to separate from the sound of water. In Ogawa and the neighbouring village of Higashi-Chichibu, paper is still formed by hand from kōzo, the paper mulberry, in workshops and teaching studios where the tools stand in the order they are used rather than behind glass. Boil the bark, strip it, rinse the fibre in cold water, lift it on a bamboo screen: that sequence is not a diagram on a wall but the work itself, done at the riverside in the cold months.

The cold is not incidental to it. Fibre tightens better at low temperatures, so the most demanding part of the year's work arrives in the part of the year least comfortable to do it in, and the calendar of a papermaking district is set by that fact rather than by demand. Ikebukuro is about seventy minutes away on the Tobu Tōjō line, near enough that the town is not remote in any practical sense. There is also a long-standing organic farming scene here, which means some of the people who settled in Ogawa arrived for the soil rather than for the paper, and then stayed for both.

If you make a sheet yourself in one of the teaching studios, what transfers to your hands is not technique but timing. How fast you rock the screen and how long you let it rest decides the thickness, and the decision gets made in about two seconds, before you have understood that you were making it. Handmade paper is not doing what machines cannot do so much as spending water and time differently: a day to dry one sheet, a year to wait for the right cold. A place operating at that speed, seventy minutes from Ikebukuro, is the harder thing to take in.