Japanese sculpture

The sculpture of Japan started from the clay figure. Japanese sculpture received the influence of the Silk Road culture in the 5th century, and received a strong influence from Chinese sculpture afterwards. The influence of the Western world was received since the Meiji era. The sculptures were made at local shops, used for sculpting and painting. Most sculptures were found at areas in front of houses and along walls of important buildings.

Most of the Japanese sculptures derived from the idol worship in Buddhism or animistic rites of Shinto deity. In particular, sculpture among all the arts came to be most firmly centered on Buddhism. Materials traditionally used were metal—especially bronze—and, more commonly, wood, often lacquered, gilded, or brightly painted.

Interest in primitive arts is seeing a wide ascendancy and spontaneity and seek to produce a similar artless artistry in their own works. In every instance examples of ancient primitive art have been found to possess characteristics identical to modern arts; and the ancient Japanese clay figures known as dogū (土偶) and haniwa (埴輪) are no exceptions to this rule.

No scholar has been able to determine absolutely just when human life moved over into the Japanese archipelago. It was these early inhabitants who eventually evolved the first crude Japanese native art in rough earthenware and in strange clay figures called dogū, which are probably fetishes of some religious nature. Some may have been used in fertility rites, and some in exorcism or other forms of primitive ritual.

The dogū figures are impressive in their grotesque and mysterious symbolism; and there is a crude sense of primitive force and passion in the strongly engraved lines and swirls with which the figures are decorated.

Legend, as recorded in the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) which is an ancient history of Japan compiled in 720, states that thaniwa was ordered at the time of an empress's death by the emperor who regretted the custom of servants and maids of the deceased following their master in death, and ordered that clay figures be molded and placed around the kofun burial mound instead of the sacrifice of living beings. Scholars doubt the authenticity of this story and contend that plain cylindrical clay pipes were the first haniwa forms, and that they were used in the manner of stakes to hold the earth of the burial mound in place. Later these plain cylindrical haniwa came to be decorated and to take various forms, including the shapes of houses and domestic animals as well as human beings. They have been found arranged in a circle around the mound, lending credence to the scholars' theory. However, the haniwa figures no doubt came to take on some sort of religious symbolism later, aside from their original practical purpose as stakes.

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