Yachimun no Sato

The Yachimun no Sato guide walks you through what looks like a cluster of hillside houses but is really one climbing kiln, a noborigama, built by four potters in 1980 with nine separate firing chambers stacked up the slope like stairs. It follows Kinjo Jiro, later named a Living National Treasure, who left Naha's smoke-choked Tsuboya quarter for this quiet stretch of Yomitan in the early 1970s rather than give up his wood-fired kiln for gas, and the potters who followed him. By 1992 a second, even longer kiln had joined the first, thirteen chambers climbing the same hillside logic.