Art: The Haniwa Rage

When Japanese laborers were digging up a hillside to widen a highway a year ago, they unearthed a cache of hundreds of small clay figures. Callously the highway crew smashed the figures into the roadbed, but their foreman told the story at the sake house that night. Soon a delegate of National Museum curators rushed to the spot—too late. Lost: another priceless trove of Haniwa sculpture, the funerary pottery in the form of warriors, horses, shrine maidens, even ducks, monkeys and chickens found in burial mounds of the 3rd to 7th centuries A.D.

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