The workshops are spread out across the town rather than gathered. Aya holds something like forty of them — woodwork, dyeing and weaving, ceramics — distributed through the district instead of collected into a craft village. A group of craftspeople formed here in the mid-1960s, and makers have continued to arrive ever since, which is why the number is as high as it is for a town of this size.

The evergreen broadleaf forest that the townspeople protected is close by, and the idea of working from what that forest provides is shared across the workshops rather than being one studio's position. The craft festival held each November draws more than twenty thousand visitors, and it is the one occasion when workshops that operate separately all year appear in the same place at the same time. Miyazaki city is about forty minutes away by car, there is an established route into organic farming for people who want it, and workshops run by newcomers are scattered through the town alongside older ones.

A town whose workshops are dispersed cannot offer a single destination. Visitors therefore have to move around the district, and in doing so they pass the forest, the fields and the studios inside the same day, which is a different experience from walking a craft street. That dispersal was not a failure to organise itself, and gathering the workshops into one street would lose the point of the place. Aya is known as a craft town because it was built on the assumption that people would travel through it, and it only reads correctly at that scale.