The altar makers and the lantern makers are on the same street. Yame Fukushima is a district of white-walled merchant houses, and inside those buildings are workshops making Buddhist altars, paper lanterns and washi. An altar is built by division of labour — the joiner, the carver, the lacquerer, the metal fittings maker — which means a town producing them has to hold several distinct trades within walking distance of each other.

A lantern is a different division: winding the frame, pasting the paper, painting the surface. That one is also completed inside the same few streets. Yame Fukushima was designated an Important Preservation District in May 2002. Kurume is about forty minutes away by car, and the surrounding country is tea-growing land, so the town sits at the meeting point of a craft economy and an agricultural one. Some workshops let the work be seen from the shopfront, and you can catch a process partway through simply by walking past at the right hour.

An artisan district works better the closer its stages are. If a carved body can be carried to the lacquerer in five minutes, nobody has to pack it, transport it, or manage what the humidity does to it in between — so a compact town is at an advantage over a large one, which is the opposite of how most industries behave. That is why the workshops of Yame are gathered rather than dispersed across the district. The town is compact on purpose, and it has stayed that way through a century in which almost every other industry moved in the opposite direction.