Hita, Oita

Nine kilns. That is all there are, and all there will be. The Sarayama valley in the mountains above Hita City has produced Onta ware for three hundred years from these nine kilns, each passed from father to son, the techniques transmitted within families and not outside them. The number nine is not a policy; it is the natural consequence of a tradition that does not recruit.

The clay is crushed by water-powered mills — wooden hammers driven by the stream that runs through the valley, the same sound that has defined this place for centuries. The glazing techniques — brush decoration, dripped glaze, combed patterns — are specific to Onta and recognizable once you have seen them. The wood-fired kilns produce the particular variation in surface that only wood firing achieves.

Yanagi Soetsu, the founder of Japan's mingei movement, called Onta one of the most beautiful villages in Japan. The description holds. The valley is narrow, the kilns are visible from the road, the sound of the mills is constant. You can watch the potters work, and you can buy directly from the kilns. The experience of acquiring an Onta bowl in Sarayama — rather than in a craft shop in a city — changes the object. It becomes a place as much as a thing.

At night, the floats fill with light.

In Hita, in Oita—a town that still keeps the look of the old shogunal domain, in its Mameda and Kuma quarters—tall floats, some ten meters high, move through the old streets in late July to the sound of Gion music. There are nine of them, and every one is made by hand by the people of its own neighborhood.

The daytime floats are splendid, but the heart of this festival is the night. Hung with lanterns, they become banyama, evening floats, countless small flames floating in the dark as the music rises and the festival reaches its peak.

Gion worship here goes back some five hundred years; by 1714 floats much like today's were already being offered. It is the rite of three shrines, and each year the floats carry a scene from kabuki, brought to life by a doll maker's hands.

It is a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property and part of the UNESCO-listed float festivals. A week before the festival, all the floats gather in front of Hita Station for the shudan kaomise, the lit evening floats assembled in one place—a sight worth timing a visit around.

Hita is a town of water, threaded by the Mikuma River, its old merchant houses still standing in Mameda. Spend the day in the streets and the night following the lit floats, and the summer of this water town deepens with the lanterns.