The characters on a shogi piece are either written or carved. Tendo's workshops are scattered through the town rather than gathered into one quarter, and between them they cover both methods: kaki-goma, where the character is applied with a brush, and hori-goma, where it is cut into the wood with a blade. The finishing divides again from there — lacquer filled into the cut and ground back flush, or lacquer built up above the surface in relief — and each of those stages has its own specialists, working in different buildings.

The local museum shows the whole sequence and lets visitors try part of it, and what most people end up noticing there is the shape of the piece itself. It is not symmetrical, and it is not meant to be. The faces taper, the head is narrower than the base, and the surface that carries the character sits at a slight angle, which is what makes a piece settle into the hand the way it does. Yamagata city is twenty minutes away by car, there is a Shinkansen station, and the shops and hospital are in the town centre, so nothing about daily life here requires leaving town.

An enormous amount of work goes into an object used only on a board. Shogi can be played with paper and a pencil; the quality of the pieces has no bearing on who wins. A district that has spent the years since the late Edo period refining something the outcome does not depend on is faintly comic and entirely admirable, and both of those are best appreciated with a piece in your hand, turned over once, and set down on a board that does not care.