Tokoname, Aichi

The black board fences run along narrow lanes that tip and curve with the hillside, and between them the old kiln chimneys still stand, brick-red against a pale sky. This is Tokoname, a town on the western shore of the Chita Peninsula where pottery has been fired since the late Heian period — one of Japan's six ancient kiln sites, and among them a place of particular scale and continuity. Along the Yakimono Sanpomichi, a walking course threading past climbing kilns and the famous slope lined with drainage pipes set into the earth, the industry does not feel museumified so much as simply present, its residue built into the ground underfoot.

The fishing harbors at Onizaki and Ono bring in asari clams, anago, shako, and gazami crab from Ise Bay, and the town also produces nori through aquaculture — a quieter industry that runs alongside the ceramics without announcing itself. The INAX Live Museum gathers the wider history of fired clay, from tiles to drainage pipes, across several exhibition buildings; it is the kind of institution that takes the industrial seriously. In the old merchant quarter, the Takita family residence, a late Edo-period shipping merchant's house, survives as a designated cultural property, its proportions recalling the era when Tokoname's kilns supplied the sea routes.

Since the opening of Chubu Centrair International Airport in 2005, the town sits at an unexpected intersection — ancient kilns on one side, a major international gateway on the other. The Aichi Sky Expo exhibition hall now occupies the airport island. Yet the lanes near the Yakimono Sanpomichi remain unhurried, and the smoke-stained chimneys hold their ground.