Paper dyed with indigo changes colour as it dries. Awa washi is made from kōzo and mitsumata, and the workshops and the industry hall are gathered at Yamakawa in Yoshinogawa. This is indigo country — the same river basin grew the crop — so some of the paper here is dyed with it, and the two trades, dyeing and papermaking, are connected inside a single district rather than across a supply chain.

Sheets the size of a tatami mat are also made here. A screen that large cannot be handled alone: several people take the frame together and lift the whole sheet out of the vat in one movement, which has to be done in one attempt. The hall is open from nine until five, visitors can make a sheet themselves, and admission is five hundred yen for adults, four hundred for junior high school students and three hundred for elementary school students. Tokushima city is about forty minutes away by car, notices seeking successors in papermaking are posted, and the district continues at a small scale.

Large paper cannot be made by one person. The weight of the frame sets the number of hands required, so any district making oversized sheets needs several people working in time with each other, and the dimensions of the paper effectively determine the size of the workshop. It works in the other direction too, which is the awkward part. When a workshop loses a person, there are sheet sizes it can no longer produce at all, and the largest paper is always the first thing to go. The dimensions on a price list are, read carefully, a statement about how many people are still working in the building.