The slope is the shop. Jōnaizaka in Mashiko climbs for a few hundred metres with kilns and pottery shops on both sides, and a climbing kiln left standing partway up, so that walking the hill is the same activity as looking at the work. Outside the twice-yearly pottery fairs the doors are still open on most days: you pass a wheel, then a drying rack, then a shelf of finished pieces, in that order, which is the order in which they happened. Nobody explains this; the street simply runs that way, uphill, in the order the work is done.

What is on the shelves varies more than the single name Mashiko-yaki suggests. Thick, heavy domestic ware sits within a few doors of thin, exact pieces by named makers, and the price range of the district is legible in an afternoon. The Moka railway runs toward Utsunomiya, and the town is small enough that the walk from the station is part of the visit rather than a preliminary to it. Properties with kilns attached come up for sale from time to time, and makers who arrived from elsewhere have kept arriving, which is why the average age here is not what the phrase "traditional pottery town" leads people to expect.

A pottery district wears its price range in public. A three-hundred-yen dish and a piece costing a hundred times that are a few doors apart, and nobody has arranged the street to keep them from meeting. The customer is trusted to work out the difference. Not hiding the gap is the local manner, and it makes the town unusually easy to shop in: you can see the whole spectrum in an hour and decide where on it you belong.