ms to have been specially
manufactured, or at any rate selected, for purposes of sepulture, and
it evidently retained its shape and character from very remote if not
from prehistoric times. Known in Japan as iwaibe (sacred utensils),
it resembles the pottery of Korea so closely that identity has been
affirmed by some archaeologists and imitation by others. It has
comparatively fine paste--taking the primitive pottery as
standard--is hard, uniformly baked, has a metallic ring, varies in
colour from dark brown to light gray, is always turned on the wheel,
has only accidental glaze, and is decorated in a simple, restrained
manner with conventionalized designs. The shapes of the various
vessels present no marked deviation from Chinese or Korean models,
except that, the tazzas and occasionally other utensils are sometimes
pierced in triangular, quadrilateral, and circular patterns, to which
various meanings more or less fanciful have been assigned.

There is, however, one curious form of iwaibe which does not appear
to have any counterpart in China or Korea. It is a large jar, or
tazza, having several small jars moulded around its shoulder,* these
small jars being sometimes interspersed with, and sometimes wholly
replaced by, figures of animals.** It is necessary to go to the
Etruscan "black ware" to find a parallel to this most inartistic kind
of ornamentation.

*This style of ornamentation was called komochi (child-bearing), the
small jars being regarded as children of the large.

**Mr. Wakabayashi, a Japanese archaeologist, has enumerated seven
varieties of figures thus formed on vases: horses, deer, wild boars,
dogs, birds, tortoises; and human beings.

With regard to the general decorative methods of the iwaibe potters,
it is noticeable, first, that apparent impressions of textiles are
found (they are seldom actual imprints, being usually imitations of
such), and, secondly, that simple line decoration replaces the rude
pictorial representations of a primitive culture and suggests
propagation from a centre of more ancient and stable civilization
than that of the Yamato hordes: from China, perhaps from Korea--who
knows? As for the terracotta figures of human beings and sometimes of
animals found in connexion with Yamato sepulchres, they convey little
information about the racial problem.* The idea of substituting such
figures for the human beings originally obliged to follow the dead to
the grave seems to have come f