The pattern was not drawn on. Hatajuku sits on the old Hakone road, and workshops making yosegi-zaiku — parquetry assembled from woods of different natural colours — stand along the slope in some number. The colours are not dye or paint. Lengths of timber are glued into a block whose cross-section is the pattern, and the finished sheet is shaved off that block, thin enough to see light through, so the design exists in the material before anyone cuts it. The craft is said to have begun here around two hundred years ago, and Hatajuku still holds the workshops, the museum and the places where visitors can try it.

In the warring-states period this was the midpoint of the Hakone crossing, the place where people going over the pass stopped walking for a while. That is why a post town and a craft district occupy the same single road: the customers were already coming past the door, and the trade grew where the traffic paused. Watching the process, what surprises most people is the ratio. Designing a pattern takes an afternoon; gluing, clamping and curing the block takes far longer, and most of the working day is spent on the part nobody sees.

Hakone-Yumoto is fifteen minutes away by car, the work here is inns and craft, and the road ices over in winter. Inside one of the busiest resort areas in the country, this village keeps to the maker's clock rather than the visitor's, and the back of a shop runs straight into the workshop without a door between them. That openness is not a policy about tourism. It is possible because there is no stage in the process that would be damaged by being watched.