Celadon Phoenix Ear Vase (signed Mansei)

A Vase Named for Ten Thousand Sounds

Bansei means "ten thousand sounds." The name comes from a line of Chinese verse about fulling cloth under the moon: a thousand strokes of the mallet, then ten thousand more. In the seventeenth century, the retired Emperor Gosai (1638–1685) borrowed that line to christen two celadon vases whose silhouettes recalled a kinuta, the wooden block on which cloth was beaten. One vase, kept by the Konoe family of court nobles, became Sensei, "a thousand sounds." The other, the finer of the pair, became Bansei.

That second vase now sits in a display case at the Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts in Izumi City, Osaka Prefecture. Officially titled Seiji Hoo-mimi Hanaike, the Celadon Flower Vase with Phoenix Ears, it was designated a National Treasure of Japan on June 9, 1951. It stands 33.6 centimeters tall, was fired in China during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), and has spent roughly seven hundred years in Japan being passed between shoguns, empresses, princes, and temples.

A flower vase, in other words, with a biography.

What the Longquan Kilns Made

The vase is attributed to the Longquan kilns of Zhejiang Province on the basis of its glaze, clay body, and form. Longquan was the most productive celadon center of Song-dynasty China, and its Southern Song output reached a level of refinement that later generations rarely matched. The signature color is called funsei in Japanese, "powder blue": a soft, milky blue-green produced by a thick glaze over a grayish clay containing a trace of iron.

The effect depends on chemistry and chance. During firing, countless microscopic bubbles form and remain suspended in the glaze layer. They scatter light, and the surface takes on a semi-translucent depth closer to polished jade than to glass. Song connoisseurs prized exactly this quality; Chinese texts of the period compared the best Longquan wares to jade outright.

Vases of this shape, with a cylindrical body, a long slender neck, and a mouth flaring open like a funnel, were exported to Japan in quantity during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (roughly the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries). Japanese tea practitioners grouped them under the name kinuta seiji, "fulling-block celadon," after the resemblance to that humble household tool. A pair of sculpted phoenix ears attached to the neck distinguishes this particular type. Several phoenix-ear vases survive in Japanese collections, including examples at the Yomei Bunko library in Kyoto and the Museum of Oriental Ceramics in Osaka, both designated Important Cultural Properties. Only Bansei holds the higher rank of National Treasure.

Why This One Became a National Treasure

The government first protected the vase in 1906, during the Meiji era, under the designation system that preceded the current law. When Japan rebuilt its cultural property legislation after the war, Bansei was elevated to National Treasure in the very first round of crafts designations, in June 1951. Its registration number is 28.

The official record gives two reasons. First, workmanship: among all surviving phoenix-ear flower vases, this one shows the most careful execution, with a poised, commanding presence that the appraisal describes in terms usually reserved for sculpture. The proportions hold steady from any angle. The neck rises without hesitation; the funnel mouth opens in a clean arc; the two phoenixes sit symmetrically without crowding the profile.

Second, history. The vase was already treasured as a meibutsu, a celebrated named object, by the Muromachi period. Documents preserved with it, along with the eighteenth-century record Kaiki, trace a provenance that few ceramics anywhere can rival.

An Empress, a Prince-Priest, and a Mountain Temple

According to the transmitted documents, the vase was presented during the rule of the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, to Tofukumon'in (1607–1678). She was born Tokugawa Masako, daughter of the second shogun Hidetada, and entered the imperial palace as consort to Emperor Go-Mizunoo, a marriage engineered to bind the warrior government to the throne. A Chinese celadon of this caliber was a fitting gift for a woman who stood at the junction of both worlds.

Tofukumon'in bequeathed the vase to Prince-Priest Koben (1669–1716), an imperial son who had taken Buddhist vows. Through him it passed to Bishamon-do, the monzeki temple in the Yamashina hills east of Kyoto where he served, and there it remained through the Edo period. The naming episode belongs to this same courtly circle: the retired Emperor Gosai selected the poetic line, and the anecdote was set down in Kaiki, a journal recording the conversations of the statesman Konoe Iehiro, whose own family kept the companion vase Sensei.

In the modern era the vase left the temple for a private collection, and eventually came to the City of Izumi, which today owns it on behalf of its citizens. The chain of custody, empress to prince to temple to museum, is documented at each step. That paper trail is part of what the designation protects.

Looking Closely

Stand in front of the case and let your eye travel from the base upward. The body is a quiet cylinder; nothing about it announces itself. The drama begins at the shoulder, where the glaze pools thickly and the blue-green deepens a shade. Then the neck climbs, and at its top the mouth flares wide, a shape some viewers read as a mortar, others as an open flower.

Now look at the edges. At the rim of the mouth and along the raised ridges of the phoenix ears, the glaze thins as it runs off the high points, and the pale clay body glows through. The single color suddenly has a register of light and dark. This is not an accident the potter tolerated; it is an effect the Longquan workshops controlled and exploited, and on Bansei it reads with unusual clarity.

The phoenixes themselves reward a moment of patience. Each bird is modeled in relief, wings folded, head turned, and the pair were pressed onto the neck before glazing so that the thick funsei coat softens their contours into something half-seen, like figures under ice.

The vase is not on permanent view. The museum rotates its collection through four or five exhibitions a year, and Bansei appears periodically, often as the centerpiece of a special display. Check the exhibition schedule on the museum website before planning a trip around it.

The Museum That Cotton Built

The Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts opened in October 1982 on the former residence site of the Kubo family, whose company, Kuboso, spun and wove cotton in Izumi for nearly a century beginning in 1886. When the firm closed in 1977, the third-generation president Kubo Sotaro donated the family's art collection, the land, the buildings, and an endowment to the city. Later gifts expanded the holdings to roughly twelve thousand works, including two National Treasures and twenty-nine Important Cultural Properties, spanning Japanese painting and calligraphy, Chinese bronzes and ceramics, ukiyo-e prints, and a group of Western paintings with works by Monet and Renoir.

The museum grounds include a Japanese garden and tea houses, and the scale stays human; six exhibition rooms, never a crowd to fight. Hours are 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with last entry at 4:30 p.m., closed Mondays (open on holiday Mondays, closing the following weekday instead) and during exhibition changeovers and the New Year period. Regular admission runs around 500 to 600 yen depending on the exhibition, with separate pricing for special exhibitions.

Getting there takes a small effort, which keeps the visit pleasantly uncrowded. From Osaka, ride the Semboku Line to Izumi-Chuo Station, then a Nankai bus about ten minutes to the Bijutsukan-mae stop, which sits directly in front of the museum. An alternative route runs by bus from Izumi-Fuchu Station on the JR Hanwa Line. While in the area, the Osaka Prefectural Museum of Yayoi Culture near Shinodayama presents finds from the Ikegami-Sone archaeological site, one of the largest Yayoi-period settlements excavated in Japan, and the hillside temple Matsuo-dera lies a short ride beyond the museum on the same bus route.