ABSTRACT

Encounters with two eccentric antiquities got me thinking about the relationship between the ancient past (a space now occupied by what are termed the Jōmon and Yayoi periods, which combined lasted from around 15,000 years ago to around 300 ce) and the premodern period in Japan. The first, a woodblock print assigned to the artist Utagawa Toyokuni based on a drawing of the Forum at Rome, caught my attention in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2005. Utagawa certainly never visited the Forum at Rome and must have derived his inspiration from information that filtered into Tokugawa period (1600–1868) Japan through the activities of the Dutch East India Company, and he would not have known that the Roman Empire, whose glories are reflected in his woodblock print, was the contemporary of the Yayoi period, which was influenced by Rome’s counterpart in East Asia, the Han empire, in whose records occur the first mentions of what we know as Japan. 1 The second is the lower part of a Jōmon pot, which we now know was probably made around 5000 years ago, and which appears to have been re-used as a water container for the tea ceremony, sometime between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, most likely by someone who did not know the term “Jōmon,” and yet latterly ended up in the British Museum in London and gained new fame courtesy of the BBC Radio series, “A History of the World in 100 Objects.” 2