(piano music)
- [Dr. Zucker] We're in the Tokyo National Museum,
looking at a Haniwa figure of a warrior.
- [Dr. Harris] Haniwa are clay objects, sometimes cylinders,
sometimes later in their development, figures and animals,
that decorated the tops of tombs in Japan
beginning in the third century
through the sixth or seventh century.
- [Dr. Zucker] These tombs could be enormous.
The largest one is nearly five football fields long.
- [Dr. Harris] And most of them were keyhole-shaped.
The circular area at the top was mounded
and that's where the burial chamber was.
- [Dr. Zucker] These landforms
were often surrounded by moats
and were originally cleared except for Haniwa,
which populated their tops.
- [Dr. Harris] And populated is a really good word
because on some of the largest of these tombs,
obviously meant for the most powerful people of this time,
there could be between 10 and 20 thousand Haniwa
occupying the top of the tomb, sometimes arranged
in a circle around the outside,
sometimes a cluster of figures toward the center.
- [Dr. Zucker] Often around the form of a house.
All of this clay is low fire and unglazed
and that gives it its characteristic reddish color.
- [Dr. Harris] And by low fire,
you mean it's fired at a low temperature,
so we're not talking about a very complicated technology
to harden this clay.
- [Dr. Zucker] Well, if you have 10 to 20 thousand of these
to make when somebody dies, you need to do it quickly.
- [Dr. Harris] Although I imagine,
just like in many other cultures,
a rule often made arrangements for their funerary objects
or their tomb even while they were alive,
so many may not have been made at the last minute,
but this is all clearly for rulers and elites.
- [Dr. Zucker] It's also interesting to understand
the evolution of Haniwa.
The simplest and earliest forms are cylinders.
They seem to have developed into the houses that we spoke of
and that was followed then by animals.
- [Dr. Harris] And then figures.
And the figures and animals are of a remarkable variety,
so there's a sense both of agriculture, of farming,
of livestock or chickens and ducks and other kinds of fowl,
and there are wild boar,
and we also see horses and soldiers.
We see musicians.
- [Dr. Zucker] And women.
- [Dr. Harris] In fact, there's one
lovely female figure here
touching her breast with one hand
and offering a cup with another
who is beautifully, luxuriously dressed
with a necklace and a bracelet,
and her garment is both painted and incised,
and it's a good reminder that many of these were painted.
- [Dr. Zucker] And many of them are elaborate.
Let's look at one of the most elaborate,
a larger warrior Haniwa.
- [Dr. Harris] The word elaborate is really good
for describing their clothing.
The faces and bodies can be very simplified.
- [Dr. Zucker] It suggests to me
that the clothing represents their station in life,
and that's what was important.
It wasn't important who they were individually,
but rather the part that they would play
in the afterlife of the ruler.
This particular figure looks like
he's doing a very good job guarding the tomb.
He's armed with a sword.
He's armed with what is probably the remnants of a bow.
He's got a quiver on his back, and he's completely covered
in a Japanese style of armor known as keiko,
plates of armor that hang.
- [Dr. Harris] You can see the details
of how the armor was made.
- [Dr. Zucker] You can even see that he's wearing
a wrist guard to protect his left arm
from the string of a bow after he unleashes the arrow,
because when the bow spring is loosed and snaps back,
it can hit the arm and hurt.
- [Dr. Harris] And what's wonderful here in this museum
is that we have examples of the armor.
- [Dr. Zucker] And you can even see
how the armor is constructed.
Plates are joined together with metal rivets,
and those are represented by small little buttons of clay
on this Haniwa.
- [Dr. Harris] So we're talking about iron plates
that have been either fastened together with rivets,
or, in other cases, perhaps tied together with leather.
- [Dr. Zucker] There's a tremendous amount of specificity.
If you look at the scabbard that holds his sword,
you can see that it's tied with a string
that wraps around the back of his waist on either side,
and you can even see the knot on his right hip.
- [Dr. Harris] And speaking of ties,
you can look down the backs of his legs
and see how his armor was held together.
- [Dr. Zucker] I love the way that
the flaps that come down from the helmet
to protect the sides of his face frame that face
and create a shadow that creates a kind of dimensionality
that is a little bit rare in Haniwa,
which tend to be quite flat and cylindrical.
- [Dr. Harris] In fact, the word haniwa means clay cylinder,
and we know that the earliest Haniwa were simple cylinders,
but even as they develop into human figures,
so much of the form remains cylindrical.
Often, the arms are simple cylinders,
the legs are simple cylinders.
- [Dr. Zucker] But they're so expressive nonetheless.
- [Dr. Harris] What's fascinating, though,
is this combination of realism and abstraction.
We talked about the level of detail in the armor,
but in other areas when we look at the bodies of Haniwa,
the arms are too short, the legs are too short.
They're not realistic at all.
- [Dr. Zucker] The emphasis instead seems to be
on a kind of expressiveness.
- [Dr. Harris] And although these
may not look frightening to us,
they may have looked serious and formidable
during the Kofun period, the old tomb period
when these were made in Japan.
(piano music)