Ink is soot and animal glue, kneaded together. Workshops making sumi still operate inside the city of Nara: soot collected by burning oil, mixed with glue, worked by hand and pressed into moulds. At some of them you can try nigiri-zumi, in which a lump of the still-warm ink is put into your hand to squeeze, and the shape your fingers make is the shape it dries into and keeps.

Brushes are made here too, and there are places where you can attempt the hosaki, the head of the brush — sorting the hairs so the tips align, then binding the root. Both trades are small ones, and neither is organised as an industry in the way the words "producing district" suggest. The number of ink makers is not large, notices seeking successors appear, and the district has continued at this modest scale rather than growing into anything industrial. Ink making is also winter work, concentrated in the cold months when the glue keeps, so the workshops run to a seasonal clock that has nothing to do with demand.

An ink stick is consumed in use, and yet as an object it lasts for centuries. Old ink is sold as old ink, sometimes valued above new, which means the makers here are working on something that will be judged ten or twenty years after they finish it — a strange position for a craftsperson to be in. It also explains the pace of the place, which visitors often read as conservatism. The reason not to hurry lies in the material itself: an ink stick goes on changing quietly, hardening and settling, for longer than anyone now standing in the workshop will be around to see, and there is no way to speed that up.