The kilns are scattered, in the town and outside it. Karatsu ware is not made in one quarter; the workshops are spread between the town and the surrounding countryside, which takes a car and some planning to see properly in a day. Because different kilns have carried down different things — the paddled forming technique called tataki, or the brushwork of e-garatsu — the pieces have visibly distinct characters rather than a single house style that a district agreed on. Some display halls gather work from several kilns together, which makes it possible to compare first and then drive out to whichever one you responded to. Glazes here are often thin enough that the colour of the clay shows through, and the surface takes on stain with use, so the piece you buy is not finished at the moment of purchase and is not meant to be.

Tea people have valued these bowls for precisely that reason for a very long time. The Chikuhi line reaches Fukuoka in about eighty minutes, which puts the town within reach of a city without making it a suburb of one. The town has a hospital and shops, and the sea is close enough to change the weather.

Scattering is inconvenient for anyone trying to see several kilns in a single day. Karatsu was one of the first places in the country to fire at high temperature in climbing kilns, brought over by Korean potters, and the technique reached Kyushu here before it reached anywhere else. The clay is coarse and full of iron, which is why the surfaces do what they do. It is also the reason the styles never merged into one, and distance turns out to be a perfectly reasonable way to protect a difference.