One bowl passes through a hundred and twenty-four stages. Around Kawaimachi in Wajima the workshops are scattered through the town rather than gathered in one building, each taking a part of the sequence — the ground coats, the polishing, the lacquering, the maki-e decoration — and the museum shows the stages alongside the finished work. The trade association's members are lacquer shops and individual craftspeople. No single person makes a bowl. The town makes it, and the division of labour is the reason the number of stages can be as high as it is.

Cloth is applied at the rim and the foot, ground coats mixed with diatomaceous earth are built up, and each layer is polished back before the next is laid on. That is where the hundred and twenty-four comes from: it is not ceremony, it is the labour of making a bowl that survives daily use, counted out. The 2024 earthquake caused heavy damage to houses and workshops here. Recovery is still in progress, and the state of the town continues to change month by month.

A divided craft needs people in every one of its divisions, which is precisely where the present difficulty lies. The stages accumulated over a long period because each one made the finished object harder to break, and that accumulation was held in the fabric of the town as much as in any individual's hands. When buildings and residents are lost at the same time, a stage somewhere in the sequence goes missing. The durability of Wajima lacquer is a fact about the bowls, and it is also a fact about the settlement that produced them.