Flame-style Vessel
Middle Jomon period, about 3000 to 2000 BC
A deep pot whose rim erupts into four great crests of clay, curling and pointed like tongues of fire, with smaller spikes and loops running between them. Below the rim the body is covered in raised ridges that swirl and interlock down to a plain base. It is hard to believe that anyone cooked in it, and yet soot and food residue on similar vessels show that they were used over fires. The pot is about five thousand years old, made by people who lived by hunting, fishing and gathering nuts in the snow country of what is now Niigata prefecture.
The Jomon are named after the cord marks pressed into their pottery, but by the middle of the period potters along the Shinano river were building sculptural vessels unlike anything else in the world. Look at how the crests are made: thin strips of clay were applied to the rim and shaped by hand, and the ridges on the body were built up in relief rather than incised. The whole vessel was formed without a wheel, from coils, and fired in an open fire. The four sided design suggests a vessel meant to be seen from all sides, perhaps at a ceremony.
The pot is thought to come from Umataka in Nagaoka, where the first flame style vessel was discovered in 1936. Its meaning is unknown; the flames may in fact be water, or cockscombs, or nothing representational at all. What is certain is that these vessels have become emblems of Japanese prehistory and of Niigata in particular, and they inspired the artist Okamoto Taro, who saw them in this museum in the 1950s and declared them the true root of Japanese art.
Did You Know? The artist Okamoto Taro was so struck by these pots at this museum in 1952 that he declared Jomon pottery the true origin of Japanese art.
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