Bizen

Bizen is a city in southeastern Okayama Prefecture, Japan, facing the Seto Inland Sea with an intricate coastline that forms part of Setonaikai National Park. About eighty percent of the city is forested and flat land is scarce. The area belonged to the ancient Bizen Province and has been famous since the Kamakura period for Bizen ware pottery, whose workshops cluster in the Imbe district and whose square brick kiln chimneys mark the skyline, although refractory bricks are the core industry today. The modern city was raised in 1971 and enlarged in 2005 by merging the towns of Hinase and Yoshinaga. Its population has fallen steadily for about sixty years.