No glaze is used, so the colour is decided by the fire. Inbe is the Bizen ware district: brick chimneys stand up from the streets immediately outside the station on the Akō line, and kilns and galleries run along the road from there. Bizen is fired unglazed, to vitrification, which means the differences in how ash settles and how the flame passes over each piece become the colour and the markings of that piece and no other.

Individual makers have their own tōin, a stamped mark, so the underside of a pot tells you whose hands it came from. The Bizen ware festival is held every year on the third Sunday of October and the Saturday before it, and for those two days the entire street becomes a sales floor. Okayama is about forty minutes away by car, and premises with a kiln attached come up for sale, which is why makers keep choosing to live here rather than commuting to a workshop somewhere else.

The same clay and the same firewood produce different results depending on where in the kiln a pot was standing. What the maker controls is the form and the placement; the final colour is settled by the kiln during the firing, so nobody knows what they have until the chamber is cool enough to open. Most crafts would call that a loss of control and work to eliminate it. Most crafts would also charge less for the pieces that came out unexpectedly. This district decided, a long time ago, to treat the unpredictability as the point of the exercise, and it has organised its pricing, its language and its whole way of selling around living with that decision.