The walls are built from the bricks of demolished kilns. In the Uchiyama district of Arita, tonbai-bei survive along the lanes: walls stacked from the used firebrick of kilns that have been taken down. A kiln is rebuilt every few years, each rebuilding leaves brick over, and rather than dispose of it the town put it into walls — so a by-product of production became the characteristic surface of the streets.

Arita Uchiyama was designated an Important Preservation District in April 1991. Kilns and merchant houses stand along the same street rather than in separate quarters, which is what a district looks like when the people making the goods and the people exporting them needed to speak to each other daily. At Izumiyama there is the quarry where the stone for the porcelain was dug, and it can be reached on foot from the town, so raw material, workshop and finished ware can be followed in a single day. Sasebo and Takeo are each about forty minutes away by car; there are jobs in the ceramics industry and workshop premises for sale, and the district still takes people in.

Porcelain is made from crushed stone, not from clay dug soft out of a field. This town has been converting a mountain into tableware for centuries, and the quarry records the volume exactly: what was removed is now an absence in the hillside, measurable by eye. The scale of the industry is written into the landform. Between the walls in the lanes and the hollow left in the hill, the town has kept a fairly complete set of accounts for how much it has made — one ledger in brick, the other in missing stone, neither of them written down by anybody.