Celadon Turnip Vase

A Southern Song Vase That Holds Its Color

Stand before this vase and the eye goes first to its profile. A full, rounded lower body draws upward into a slim neck and ends in a mouth that turns just slightly outward. Japanese collectors named this silhouette shimokabura, a turnip set low, and the word fits: the swell sits near the base, broad and settled, the way a root vegetable rests on a table. The piece stands 23.5 centimeters tall and widens to 14.5 centimeters across the body. A pale blue-grey glaze covers it so evenly that the whole surface reads as one calm field of color.

It is a Chinese vessel, made during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), and it has carried the rank of National Treasure in Japan since 1951. Today it belongs to the Arc-en-Ciel Foundation, the body behind the Hara Museum, and it spends much of its life on deposit at the Tokyo National Museum.

Celadon, and Why It Mattered Here

Celadon is a stoneware or porcelain finished with an iron-bearing glaze that fires to soft greens and blue-greys in a low-oxygen kiln. Chinese potters had refined it for centuries, and by the Song period the wares reaching Japan through trade were prized as karamono, objects from the continent treated as the height of taste. In the tea gatherings that took shape from the medieval period onward, a celadon vase of the right shape became a coveted hanaike, a vessel for a single seasonal flower.

The body of this vase is a fine ash-white porcelain. Over it the glaze sits thick and unbroken, melted smooth with none of the fine crackle that webs the surface of many Song celadons. The foot ring has been pared thin, and the recess inside it left broad and flat. These are quiet decisions, but they are the kind a maker takes only when the whole form has been thought through.

The Question of the Kiln

Where exactly the vase was fired is not settled, and the honest answer is that scholars hedge it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as a Southern Song piece and notes that it may be a product of the imperial guan kiln near the Song capital at Hangzhou, while adding that this cannot be confirmed. The reasoning runs through the surface itself. Guan wares are usually built on a darker, earthen body and show deliberate crackle where glaze and clay shrink at different rates. This vase shows none of that. Its smooth, uncrazed glaze points instead toward the Longquan kilns of southern Zhejiang, whose celadons reached Japan in quantity and where the shimokabura form is most often placed on stylistic grounds.

What is not in doubt is the quality. The official assessment praises the thick neck and the unhurried roundness of the body, calling the balance stable and accomplished, the glaze unusually even, and comparable pieces few. Among the celadon flower vases raised to National Treasure status, this is counted as one of the finest. A close sibling in the shimokabura shape, the vase known by the name Kasugai, sits in the Museum of Oriental Ceramics in Osaka and is firmly given to Longquan, which makes the two useful to see side by side in the mind.

How It Earned Its Rank

The vase was first listed as an Important Cultural Property in January 1931. When Japan rebuilt its heritage system after the 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, the finest works were re-examined and promoted, and in June 1951 this piece was raised to National Treasure under designation number 13. Its standing rests on three things at once: the rarity of an intact celadon of this calibre, the discipline of its potting, and a glaze that has survived eight centuries without losing its quiet blue.

Its modern history runs through one of the great Meiji collectors. The vase was held by Hara Rokurō, a financier of the new industrial era and a serious gatherer of East Asian art. That collection passed to the foundation his descendants established, and the celadon now sits among the older holdings of the Hara name, shown in rotation rather than kept permanently on a single shelf.

What to Look For

Give the proportions a moment. The neck is thicker than a quick glance expects, and that heft is what keeps the tall form from looking fragile above its rounded base. Read the glaze next. Tilt your view and you find no crackle to interrupt it, only the slow shift of blue into grey where the layer thins over a curve. If the vase is displayed where you can see underneath, the pared foot and the wide flat base reward the look, the unglazed clay there showing the warm tone of the fired body against the cool glaze above.

Where to See It

This is a portable object, not a fixture, and it moves. For long stretches it is on deposit at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, Tokyo, where it appears in the East Asian ceramics displays from time to time rather than on permanent view. It also returns north for exhibitions of the Hara Rokurō collection at the Hara Museum ARC in Shibukawa, Gunma. Because the schedule rotates, anyone making a special trip should check current listings before setting out.

The Gunma venue is worth the journey on its own. The Hara Museum ARC sits on the high ground at the foot of Mt. Haruna, a short drive from the hot-spring town of Ikaho. Its black timber buildings were designed by the architect Arata Isozaki, and a special room called the Kankaian, built in the manner of a traditional shoin study, sets pieces from the Hara collection of East Asian art against works of contemporary art. Ikaho Onsen, with its stone-stepped street and old bathhouses, makes an easy pairing for the same day.