What Did the Clay Figurines Pray For? The Shape of the Jomon Heart Across Ten Millennia

The Jomon people left no writing. So what they believed, what they feared, and to what they pressed their hands together — we cannot know in their own direct words. Yet they left their hearts behind in another form. Clay figurines shaped like human beings, stones laid out in a circle, and pottery as if flame were blazing up. There, the prayers and the awe of human beings living within nature are inscribed, as straight as it is clumsy. These artifacts are the ‘shape of the heart’ of people without writing. Let us peer into ten thousand years of the spiritual world, with clay and form as our clues.

Clay Figurines Broken on Purpose

A clay figurine is a piece of fired ware that kneads clay into a human shape. Most are thought to be shaped after women, with full breasts and protruding bellies. They went on being made from the early Jomon period through long ages, and their faces and forms changed greatly by region and era. From simple ones to the distinctive, like the wide-eyed ‘snow-goggle figurine,’ their expression is truly diverse.

Clay figurines hold one great mystery. Many of the figurines that are unearthed are found in a state as if their hands, feet, or heads had been broken on purpose. Those that remain in complete form are, if anything, few. From this fact, there are researchers who think that clay figurines were originally made in order to be broken.

So why were they broken? One leading view is that the figurine was a substitute. Illness, injury, or the dangers that accompany childbirth — let the figurine take them on. By breaking a figurine in a person’s place, people sought to drive away calamity — so the idea goes, that they were tools of magic. From their full-bodied forms, there is also a view that lays upon them the power to bring forth life, or a prayer toward nature’s bounty. Yet these are no more than conjecture, and for what purpose clay figurines were made remains undetermined even now.

The Ring of Stones, and the Place Life Returns To

If a clay figurine is a prayer entrusted to an ‘object,’ there was also prayer on a far larger scale. It is the ‘stone circle,’ where stones were laid out in a ring upon the ground. The ‘Oyu Stone Circles’ in the city of Kazuno, Akita Prefecture, are known as a representative example. Made up of two great rings of stone, Manza and Nonakado, they are thought to have been built in the Late Jomon, roughly four thousand years ago, as a ritual site centered on graves.

The places where stone circles were built seem to have had a strong relation to the surrounding mountains and to the directions of sunrise and sunset by season, it is said. If they overlaid the movement of the sun with the arrangement of stones, it suggests the possibility that they watched the turning of the heavenly bodies attentively and were conscious of something like a calendar. To set one’s prayer in step with the rhythm of nature — that was surely deeply bound up with Jomon life, lived together with the seasons.

And beneath the ring of stones, there were often graves. In the place where the dead were buried, stones were laid in a circle, and people gathered and offered prayer. There, the living and the dead shared one place. Considered together with the burial of people and dogs in the shell mounds touched on last time, perhaps for the Jomon people death was not something cut off from life, but was close at hand as a part of the turning of life.

Pottery in the Shape of Flame

In speaking of the shape of the Jomon heart, there is one more thing we must not forget: ‘flame-style pottery.’ Made in the Shinano River basin in the Middle Jomon, roughly five thousand years ago, the rim of this pottery rises up like blazing flame, and swirling patterns undulate across the whole surface. A group of pieces unearthed at the Sasayama site in Niigata Prefecture was designated a National Treasure, and is known as a special presence even among Jomon pottery.

What is astonishing is its decoration, ornate to the point of excess. For a tool meant for cooking, such complex ornament is not originally necessary. Beyond practical use, the maker could not help expressing something — there is an intensity in this pottery that makes one feel so. Is it flame, the flow of water, or something else? The true identity of what was shaped is not known, but inscribed clearly upon it is the sensibility of people who saw in it the dynamic power of nature, and lodged prayer and beauty even in the tools of daily life.

A practical tool, and yet an expression that overflows beyond it. Flame-style pottery speaks eloquently that the Jomon people were not living a life of merely ‘staying alive.’ A heart that pours such modeling even into the pot for the day’s cooking. There lies the rich working of the human spirit — of people who, while facing nature, could not help bringing forth beauty.

The clay figurines, the ring of stones, and the pottery of flame are all fossils of the heart, left by people who had no writing. What they prayed for, we cannot know the answer to completely. Yet from the gesture of their hands — pleading with a figurine to take on calamity, laying stones along the path of the sun, shaping flame into a pot — one world view, fearing nature and cherishing life, does indeed rise up. Then, in a society that nurtured such a rich spirit, were there differences of rank or conflict? Next time, we venture into the greatest mystery of Jomon: ten thousand years without a king.