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.

Following the 1950 rediscovery of Haniwa sculpture by U.S.-born Isamu Noguchi (TIME, Jan. 10, 1955), who spotted the archaic objects as prize examples of primitive sculpture, Haniwa blossomed into a collector's craze from Japan to Manhattan. A rare piece brings as much as $10,000 today, and a good one worth $10 in 1952 currently costs $1,000 or more. Counterfeiters, doing a thriving trade, have learned to duplicate the primitive process of coiling ropes of clay into the rough form, then smoothing it into shape. They even grind up old Haniwa fragments to powder the new interiors with ancient dust.

Last week Tokyo's largest private art gallery, the Bridgestone, owned by Western Art Collector Shojiro Ishibashi (whose name translates into stone bridge), was displaying 38 figures, one of the largest Haniwa exhibits ever held. Among the prize examples from private and public collections all over Japan were seven objects now officially classified as unexportable "Important Cultural Assets," only one cut below "National Treasure." (But even with Japan's leading Haniwa expert, Professor Fumio Miki, on watch, two examples had to be withdrawn as suspected fakes after the catalogue had gone to press.)

Haniwa is an enigmatic art. The picturesque account given in the Nihon Shoki (chronicles of Japan compiled in the 8th century) credits Emperor Suinin (29 B.C.-A.D. 70) with substituting clay figures for the human retainers who customarily had been buried alive with their masters. Historians scuttled this colorful explanation by discovering that Haniwa figures were not made until centuries after inin's rule. Best bet is that the Haniwa figures, along with houses and boats, were meant to console the dead. Says Expert Fumio Miki: "We can only surmise from the data on hand that they were grave decorations, much in the manner of flower wreaths used today in Japan."

What makes Haniwa art the more beguiling is that it plants modern Japanese art in the bedrock of the nation's culture, before Buddhism was imported from China and Korea. Gallerygoers readily identify the unchanging gabled houses still found in country districts, and the traditional peasant women's dress. Art lovers see even more in Haniwa. Wrote one Japanese critic: "Haniwa's geometrizing of natural forms is exactly in tune with the dicta of cubism. Artists are now ready to accept Haniwa as 'pure art' and as delightful, intuitive jugglings of basic sculptural forms."