The walls are stacked from the tools used inside the kilns. The Kamagaki no Komichi is a lane of about four hundred metres, climbing and turning, walled on both sides with kamagaki — retaining walls and boundary walls built from used kiln furniture. Kiln furniture is what supports and separates the ware during firing, and it wears out in quantity: a working pottery produces a steady supply of the stuff, all of it useless and none of it easy to dispose of.

Rather than carting it away, Seto stacked it up, and the result is a street walled on both sides in the equipment of its own industry, worn smooth in places by a century of hands. Houses that belonged to kiln owners still stand along the lane, and the surrounding area holds a good number of potteries and galleries. The small gallery on the lane itself opens only for exhibitions, from ten until four. Meitetsu reaches Nagoya in about forty minutes, the town has shops and hospitals, and premises with a kiln attached come onto the market.

The scenery of a producing district is sometimes made out of the lifespan of its tools. The ware itself is sold and leaves — that is the point of making it — while the things that held it up during firing stay behind, because nobody wants them and moving them costs money. So what accumulates in a pottery town is always the supporting cast. What is stacked into these walls is, quite precisely, a record of everything the district made that was never for sale — the scaffolding of an industry, kept because throwing it away was more trouble than building with it.