What you notice first on one of these chests is the ironwork. Iwayado tansu are built from zelkova, lacquered, and then finished with hand-forged iron fittings hammered onto the front. The fittings are made by heating plate, working it under the hammer and cutting openwork into it, which is smithing rather than joinery — a separate trade, done by different hands, in a different building.

Some of the workshops will show the metalwork as well as the timber and the lacquering, so all three stages can be seen inside a single visit, which is unusual for a craft divided this way. The trade association here is made up of five companies, each of which keeps the techniques recognised under the traditional crafts designation at the centre of what it does rather than at the edge of it. Mizusawa-Esashi station puts the Shinkansen within reach; the surrounding country is a mixture of farmland and housing with no centre to speak of; and getting anywhere at all assumes a car.

A chest of drawers is a piece of furniture built on the assumption that it will be moved. It has to survive the weight of loaded drawers and the corner knocks of being carried through a doorway, and that requirement is what put the metal on it in the first place. The fittings are structural before they are anything else, and they were sized for the load rather than for the eye. That they became the decorative signature of the whole product is a secondary development, and a common one: the part added for protection is now the part everybody looks at first.