It starts with beating the bark. At the Aoya washi workshop the making of Inshū paper can be watched from the very beginning — the kōzo bark being pounded until the fibres separate — rather than from the picturesque part somewhere in the middle. What people picture when they think of papermaking is the shaking of the mould in the vat. What comes first is a long, repetitive job of deciding how far to break the fibres down, and nobody has ever photographed it for a brochure. The beating is monotonous enough to make you drowsy if you stand and listen to it for long enough. Then you learn that the care taken at this stage is what determines the strength of the finished sheet, and the same sound stops being background noise and becomes the thing you are there for.

The water is cold and comes from the river, which matters to the fibre. You can try it yourself, and the sheet you pull will almost certainly vary in thickness across its width in a way you cannot feel until it dries. Tottori's centre is thirty minutes away by car, and although there is a station on the San'in line, daily movement here assumes a vehicle.

Paper is thin and strong at the same time, which ought to be a contradiction and is not. Inshū paper was made here in quantity for account books and official documents, which is a duller history than art paper and a more reliable one. The workshop keeps the old tools where they were used rather than in a case, so the scale of the operation is legible. Winter is the season for making, because cold water holds the fibres apart. Nearly all of the reason for it lies in work done before any water is involved.