Jomon Pottery
A pot made for boiling food over a fire — why did it end up looking like this? It may be the question on this map with the least settled answer. The flame-style vessels found in Niigata have four projections rising from the rim like burning tongues, with spirals worked around the body. The first one came out of the ground in 1936, at the Umataka site in Nagaoka, excavated by Kondo Tokusaburo and his colleagues. That single pot was nicknamed kaen doki, "flame pottery"; every vessel of the same shape found since is called kaen-gata doki, "flame-style pottery." In 1999, 928 objects from the Sasayama site in Tokamachi were designated National Treasures. What surprises people is that these were working tools. Burnt residue survives on the inside and soot on the outside. Analysis of that residue shows nuts, meat and fish were cooked in them. One reading of the flared upper section is that it kept the pot from boiling over. In other words: a kitchen pot. Five thousand years ago there were people who gave this much form to something they set on the fire every single day. A word about the name. It was not the Japanese who coined "Jomon." In 1877 the American Edward S. Morse, who excavated the Omori shell mound, wrote "cord marked pottery" in his report. The 1879 Japanese translation rendered this as sakumon doki, and the botanist Shirai Mitsutaro later changed it to jomon, which is the word used today. On this map, style names usually begin as insults (see Gothic, Baroque, Impressionism). This one began as a foreigner's field note. One thing needs stating precisely. You often see it said that Jomon pottery is the oldest pottery in the world. It is not. The oldest currently known comes from Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi, China, at roughly 20,000 years old; the oldest in Japan is from the Odaiyamamoto I site in Aomori, at about 16,000 years. Not the oldest — among the oldest. And finally, the thing that matters most for this map. Jomon pottery became "art" only about seventy years ago. In November 1951 Okamoto Taro saw these vessels at the Tokyo National Museum and was shaken by them; the following year he published "Dialogue with the Fourth Dimension: On Jomon Pottery" in the magazine Mizue. From then on, Japanese art history books began with the Jomon. Before that these were archaeological material, not objects for an art gallery. It is the same shape of story as African sculpture being filed under "ethnographic specimen" (see African Sculpture). The objects themselves did not change at all; change one frame around them and they become something else. In 2021 the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan were inscribed as a World Heritage site.