When you're walking down the street do you ever look down?
This is why you should be excited about Japanese manhole covers.
Hello, my name's Nicole Rousmaniere. I am the IFAC Handa Curator for Japanese Arts
at the British Museum
and welcome to my corner!
What I'm really excited about is our latest acquisition.
It's a manhole cover from the city of Nagaoka, in Niigata prefecture.
If you're walking along the street in Nagaoka and you look down
you will see a prehistoric Jōmon pot.
5,000 years ago these fantastic flame pots were the symbol...have become the present
day symbol of ancient Japanese culture
and they are on the manhole covers in Nagaoka.
Now we call it a manhole cover but to be honest it's actually for waste water.
It's a waste water cover.
But in Japanese, do you know how you say manhole cover?
Manhōru. It's called manhōru. And a special type of manhōru – manhole cover
is the dezain manhōru.
And these are designed manhole covers. This boomed in Japan in the 1980s
but particularly in 1990 and Nagaoka was right on it.
And in 1990 the city decided they were going to have a dezain manhōru.
And lo and behold by April 1991 they had come up with various different ideas and
one was this spectacular one that we have now in our collection.
So I went to Nagaoka and I was walking along the road and I stepped on a manhole cover
and I looked down and there was a Jōmon pot on this manhole cover.
I thought 'this is amazing, this is something quite important'.
We did an exhibition with Nagaoka, and Nagaoka lent us two fantastic flame pots and eventually
through various different negotiations we actually got the Museum to borrow four Jōmon
flame pots that are now on long-term loan display in the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries.
Jōmon period flame pots are these prehistoric
fantastic
phantasmagoric pots
with different types of protrusions on them.
These pots were made about 3000 BC they're neolithic period
and they draw you in.
There's one though that is the best one, it's from Iwanohara
and I have right here
a 3D copy of it.
This wonderful thing made out of clay looks real. It isn't.
It's a modern replica made with 3D printing from the Iwanohara-excavated flame pot.
The pot here would have been used for stews. For all sorts of boiling.
You can imagine this in the hearth, water boiling, stews boiling, steam coming up
and these protuberances kind of intermingling with the steam.
It would have been really spectacular.
It's called a flame pot, but actually I think of it more as water
this kind of rippling waters
and you can see this kind of chicken pattern right here
this bird pattern right here.
The more you look in fact
the more you see.
And this beautiful image is actually depicted on the manhole cover itself.
So in pride of place at the bottom right.
Now on the top right you have a display of fireworks
and then on the top left you have a castle –it's modelled on Aizuwakamatsu castle
but it's actually a depiction of the reconstruction of the local history museum of Nagaoka.
The Kyōdo Shiryōkan.
And below it you have azaleas - an azalea bush which is a local, famous flower.
So you have the four famous products of Nagaoka packaged together in this wonderful manhole cover.
What is exciting for me in particular is that the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries
where we display the objects is about looking at Japan from the past to the present
and I like to think of it as looking from the present back to the past.
And so this is very much part of what we're doing in our collecting practices here
which is to go back and forth and help us understandb the past through the present and help
us understand the present by understanding the past.
Our manhole cover is very much part of that trajectory.
I think if you come and look at our manhole cover
from Nagaoka with its flame pot
with its various different patterns on it
you will never look at the street in the same way again.
This was my Curator's Corner.
I hope that you are excited about the manhole cover.
You can go on the collection online
and come and find out about it
but even better, if you're in London, come to the Japanese Galleries. They're on the
fifth floor. I like to think of it as the crown of the British Museum, at the very top.
To go up there you have to want to go up there. You don't go through the Japanese Galleries
to other galleries, it's a destination.
And I hope it will be your destination.