A daruma is sold with one eye still blank. Takasaki daruma are papier-mâché, built up in layers over a mould, and the workshops that make them are scattered around Shōrinzan Daruma-ji. Paper is pasted onto the form and left to dry, the shell is taken off the mould, and only then is it painted — which means a workshop needs a great deal of space for drying and relatively little for anything else.

Painting in the eyes is the buyer's job, not the maker's. One eye is filled when a wish is made and the other when it is fulfilled, so the object arrives incomplete by design and is finished by the person who owns it. That is why every daruma on a shop shelf is blank-eyed: they are not unsold stock in an unfinished state, they are the product in its correct condition. Takasaki station is about fifteen minutes away by car, and with both the Shinkansen and several local lines meeting there, commuting into Tokyo from this district is entirely practical for anyone who wants to.

Very few products are sold deliberately unfinished. Handing the last step to the purchaser means that objects cast from the same mould end up genuinely different from one another, because the difference is made by the owner rather than by the maker — and the two eyes will usually be painted years apart, in different circumstances. The workshops here produce everything up to the point at which a daruma becomes a daruma, and then stop. The remainder is somebody else's to do, and it is done at home, usually twice, with a brush borrowed from a drawer.