Flame-style vessel (kaen doki)
A cooking vessel from the Middle Jōmon period with a rim that looks like flames or waves. Vessels like this were built by hand from coils of clay and decorated with cords and sticks.
Look at the rim: four large lobes twisting upwards – one of the wildest vessels in the history of ceramics.
The Jōmon period was a long prehistoric era in Japan, lasting from around 14,000 BC to around 300 BC. People lived by hunting, fishing and gathering but often settled in permanent villages. They made pottery that is among the oldest in the world. The name Jōmon means roughly “cord-marked” and refers to patterns made by rolling cords against the soft clay. The culture became known to modern science when the American zoologist Edward Morse excavated a shell mound at Ōmori in Tokyo in 1877 and described the pottery as cord-marked.
Flame-style vessels, kaen doki in Japanese, were made during the Middle Jōmon period, around 3000–2000 BC. They have been found above all in present-day Niigata Prefecture, along the Shinano River. The type takes its name from finds at a site in the city of Nagaoka. The example shown here is in the Tokyo National Museum.
The vessel has a cylindrical body that widens towards the rim. The mouth has four large projections that rise like flames or waves. The surface is covered with raised loops, spirals and curving lines. The pattern covers almost the entire vessel and makes the form seem to move.
The vessels were built by hand without a potter’s wheel. The clay was rolled into long coils that were laid in rings on top of one another and smoothed. The decoration was made with sticks, cords and fingers, and the vessels were then fired in open fires. They are often dark brown or reddish brown, and the firing temperature was fairly low compared with later ceramics. Many vessels have been found in fragments and had to be reassembled by archaeologists.
Traces of soot and food residue show that many flame-style vessels were used for cooking. At the same time, they are so heavily decorated that researchers have suggested they may also have had a ritual significance. No one knows what the patterns meant. Interpretations such as that they represent fire or water are guesses.
In the 20th century Jōmon pottery attracted great interest. In the 1950s the artist Okamoto Tarō wrote about its power, calling it a primal force in Japanese art, something quite different from the refined aesthetic often emphasised in Japan. His writings helped the vessels come to be seen as art and not merely as archaeological objects.
Several flame-style vessels are now designated National Treasures in Japan. They are often shown in exhibitions on Japanese prehistory and have become a symbol of Jōmon culture. The vessels are a reminder of how skilled and expressive pottery could be long before agriculture and the state emerged in Japan.