Every year, Arita holds a townwide ceramics fair all through Golden Week, a cluster of national holidays lasting from April 29 to May 5. Stores throughout the town sell ceramics during the fair, and more than 850,000 people visit the small town! Products range from rice bowls priced at just ¥100 ($0.83 at ¥120 yen to the dollar) a piece to painted plates that cost tens of thousands of yen. The best part about visiting the fair is bargaining with the vendors. In Japan, when buying products at places like department stores, customers normally pay what is marked on the price tag. At the fair, though, most customers ask vendors for a discount and buy a product only when the price has come down to an agreeable level.

Visitors to the ceramics fair tend to come in strikingly similar outfits. They usually wear a hat or cap, sneakers, and work gloves and carry a backpack. Can you guess why they're dressed this way? The headgear and sneakers are for minimizing the exhaustion of walking around the fair, which extends for as long as five kilometers. The backpack is to keep both hands free, so that it's easier to look at the products. And the gloves are for wiping away the dust on the products, improving the chances of coming across a lucky find.

The keys to shopping cleverly at the fair are to go around many shops and find the cheapest buy; to purchase odds and ends at different shops to make a set of your own; to negotiate with vendors for discounts; and to hunt out pieces that suit you from among the countless choices available. It's possible to enjoy shopping in these ways because of the incredible number of products being sold.

Tourists carefully look at products at the ceramics fair.