Once the kiln is lit, it burns for four days. Yachimun no Sato is a cluster of workshops set among trees, with red-tiled working buildings and shops arranged so that the whole of it can be walked. Around fifty people make pottery in Yomitan, and four climbing kilns are still in use, so there are days when smoke is going up somewhere in the village. Kitagama, opened in 1992, is a kiln of thirteen linked chambers started by four potters working together. It is fired a few times a year, and each firing runs for four days without a break. Yomitanzan-gama has been in operation since 1980.

Naha is about an hour away by car. There are jobs advertised at the workshops and there is still room here for new premises, which is not the case in most established ceramic districts. Four days of firing means somebody is feeding wood in shifts around the clock, sleeping in rotation, watching the colour of the flame at three in the morning. For that week the timetable of the whole settlement bends around the kiln, and everything else — deliveries, meals, the shops opening — arranges itself accordingly.

A climbing kiln of that size cannot be fired by one person. The more chambers it has, the more hands it needs, so holding one jointly is the only practical arrangement, and the shape of that joint arrangement has determined how the workshops sit in relation to each other and how the settlement itself was laid out. The clustering is not a preference for company. The workshops are gathered in the trees because they are gathered around a kiln, and the kiln is the reason any of them can fire at all.