Bronze Bell with Kesadasuki Design

A Yayoi Bell Recorded Under a Fukui Village Name

The Bronze Bell with Kesa-dasuki Design (袈裟襷文銅鐸, Kesadasuki-mon dōtaku, also written Kesadasukimon dotaku) is a Yayoi-period bronze ritual bell excavated at Imukai in the former village of Ōishi, Sakai District, Fukui Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property on 31 March 1953, and held today by a private owner in Aichi Prefecture. The national register of the Agency for Cultural Affairs lists it under designation number 00114, branch number 00, in the archaeological materials category, with a count of one piece.

Two things about that entry are worth holding onto before anything else. The bell came out of the ground in Fukui, on the Sea of Japan side of the country. It is now four hundred kilometres away, in a private collection in Aichi. Nothing in the record explains the journey, and the fields for dimensions, weight and casting technique sit empty.

That silence is not carelessness. Bells like this one surfaced in the nineteenth century, before archaeology in Japan had methods for recording context, and many passed through dealers and collectors before any scholar measured them. What survives is the object and a place name.

The Imukai Discovery

Imukai (井向, sometimes written 井ノ向 or 井の向) lies in what is today Harue-chō, Sakai City. The old administrative name in the designation record, Ōishi village of Sakai District, disappeared through twentieth-century mergers, which is why searching for it on a modern map returns nothing.

Local accounts date the find to 1868, the fourth year of the Keiō era, when a farmer working the land turned up bronze bells. The Fukui Shimbun account describes two, one larger than the other. A regional gazetteer entry records three, and adds a detail that reads oddly and is therefore probably genuine: two of the bells were said to have been set base into base, with something coin-like enclosed inside. That description comes from a 1920 prefectural survey report, already half a century after the event.

What makes the location unusual is the ground itself. Bronze bells across western Japan are typically found buried on hillsides or in valley heads, away from settlements. The Imukai bells came from a natural levee in the middle of the Fukui Plain, the flat alluvial expanse where the Kuzuryū, Hino and Asuwa rivers converge. Stand there now and there is nothing but rice paddy in every direction.

The Fukui Plain sits near the northern edge of the bronze bell distribution. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's regional river office describes the bell found at the Yonegawaki site in the old town of Mikuni as the northernmost example in Japan. The same office notes that a stone bell mould, unfinished, was recovered at the Shimoyashiki site in Mikuni, which means casting workers were active this far north rather than every bell arriving as an import from the Kinki region.

The Imukai group is known among specialists for pictorial designs on the bell bodies, with figures reported to include people, deer, herons, frogs, a soft-shelled turtle and a raised-floor building. The national record for this particular bell does not mention pictorial decoration, and visitors should treat the pictures and this designated bell as separate matters until a published study links them.

What "Kesa-dasuki" Actually Describes

A dōtaku is a hollow bronze casting, flat-oval in section, narrow at the crown and flaring toward the base, with a suspension loop on top and thin flanges running down both sides. Early examples, roughly twenty centimetres tall, held a clapper and were rung. Over some four centuries the form grew taller, the walls thinner, the ornament bolder, and the clapper disappeared. The late bells were made to be looked at.

The name kesa-dasuki comes from the surface pattern. Bands filled with diagonal lattice run vertically and horizontally across the body, dividing each face into rectangular panels, usually four or six. Someone in the Edo period thought the grid resembled a Buddhist monk's kesa robe worn with cords crossed over the chest, and the label stuck. It has nothing to do with Buddhism, which arrived in Japan centuries after these bells were buried.

Bronze bells enter the written record late and confusedly. The Shoku Nihongi notes that in 713 an object of this kind was dug up in Uda District of Yamato Province and presented to the court, where nobody could say what it was. By then the practice that produced it had been over for roughly five hundred years.

The 1953 Designation

The designation date of 31 March 1953 places this bell in one of the large postwar batches processed under the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, enacted in 1950. Archaeological objects in private hands were a priority for that programme, because dispersal and export had been thinning the record for decades.

The reason for designation, as with most bronze bells, rests on three grounds. The casting itself demonstrates a level of bronze technology reached in the Japanese archipelago during the Yayoi period. The find spot documents the northern extension of a ritual practice centred on the Kinki region. And the object belongs to a burial deposit at Imukai, which is one of a small number of northern sites where multiple bells were interred together.

The Agency's public summary for this bell runs to a single sentence: a Yayoi-period material. That brevity is itself informative. Where the Agency has commissioned a detailed study, its database carries several paragraphs. Here it does not.

Seeing It, and What to See Instead

This bell is not on public view. It belongs to a private individual, it has no permanent display venue, and there is no address in the register at which an enquiry can be made. Photography is not possible for the same reason. Privately owned designated objects are occasionally lent to special exhibitions, so a museum in Fukui or Aichi could show it without notice, but no schedule exists to consult.

Travellers who want to see a Yayoi bronze bell in Fukui have a straightforward alternative. Sakai City owns a kesa-dasuki bell found at Yonegawaki in 1924, designated by Fukui Prefecture in 1982 and held at the Mikuni Ryūshōkan museum. The prefectural record gives its total height as 42.1 centimetres, with a suspension loop of 11.1 centimetres and a body of 31.0 centimetres, and describes four panels of diagonal lattice with sawtooth borders along the flanges. Checking the museum's opening days before travelling is sensible, as regional museums in Japan close on Mondays and over the New Year period.

Harue-chō itself is about fifteen minutes by car from central Sakai City and lies between Fukui City and the Sea of Japan coast. There is no interpretive facility at the find spot. What there is, on a clear autumn morning, is the plain: flat, wide, ringed by mountains, with the rivers that made it running low between their banks.