Читать книгу A History of the Japanese People - Kikuchi Dairoku - Страница 53

The pottery found in the Yamato tombs is somewhat more instructive than the personal ornaments. It seems to have been specially manufactured, or at any rate selected, for purposes of sepulture, and it evidently retained its shape and character from very remote if not from prehistoric times. Known in Japan as iwaibe (sacred utensils), it resembles the pottery of Korea so closely that identity has been affirmed by some archaeologists and imitation by others. It has comparatively fine paste—taking the primitive pottery as standard—is hard, uniformly baked, has a metallic ring, varies in colour from dark brown to light gray, is always turned on the wheel, has only accidental glaze, and is decorated in a simple, restrained manner with conventionalized designs. The shapes of the various vessels present no marked deviation from Chinese or Korean models, except that, the tazzas and occasionally other utensils are sometimes pierced in triangular, quadrilateral, and circular patterns, to which various meanings more or less fanciful have been assigned.

There is, however, one curious form of iwaibe which does not appear to have any counterpart in China or Korea. It is a large jar, or tazza, having several small jars moulded around its shoulder,* these small jars being sometimes interspersed with, and sometimes wholly replaced by, figures of animals.** It is necessary to go to the Etruscan "black ware" to find a parallel to this most inartistic kind of ornamentation.

*This style of ornamentation was called komochi (child-bearing), the small jars being regarded as children of the large.

**Mr. Wakabayashi, a Japanese archaeologist, has enumerated seven varieties of figures thus formed on vases: horses, deer, wild boars, dogs, birds, tortoises; and human beings.

With regard to the general decorative methods of the iwaibe potters, it is noticeable, first, that apparent impressions of textiles are found (they are seldom actual imprints, being usually imitations of such), and, secondly, that simple line decoration replaces the rude pictorial representations of a primitive culture and suggests propagation from a centre of more ancient and stable civilization than that of the Yamato hordes: from China, perhaps from Korea—who knows? As for the terracotta figures of human beings and sometimes of animals found in connexion with Yamato sepulchres, they convey little information about the racial problem.* The idea of substituting such figures for the human beings originally obliged to follow the dead to the grave seems to have come from China, and thus constitutes another evidence of intercourse, at least, between the two countries from very ancient times.

*Chinese archaic wine-pots of bronze sometimes have on the lid figures of human beings and animals, but these served a useful purpose.

It has been remarked that "the faces seen on these images by no means present a typical Mongolian type; on the contrary, they might easily pass for European faces, and they prompt the query whether the Yamato were not allied to the Caucasian race." Further, "the national vestiges of the Yamato convey an impression of kinship to the civilization which we are accustomed to regard as our own, for their intimate familiarity with the uses of swords, armour, horse-gear, and so forth brings us into sympathetic relation to their civilization." [Munro.]