Honda Shiratori Haniwa Production Site

A Factory Among the Tombs

In 1969, road-improvement work on the western side of Habikino City kept turning up the same thing: broken terracotta scattered through the soil. The fragments were haniwa, the hollow clay objects that ancient Japanese arranged on and around their burial mounds. Excavation soon showed that the pieces had not been carried far. The ground itself had been a place of manufacture, with kilns cut into a low hillside and the postholes of timber workshops set close by.

The site is now protected as the Konda Shiratori Haniwa Production Site, designated a National Historic Site on 2 June 1973. Its position explains a great deal about it. The kilns lie within the Furuichi Kofun Group, the concentration of fourth- to sixth-century burial mounds that covers much of Habikino and the adjoining city of Fujiidera. More precisely, the site sits between two enormous tombs: Konda Gobyoyama Kofun, the 425-metre keyhole mound traditionally identified as the resting place of Emperor Ojin and the second-largest kofun in the country, and the nearby Hakayama Kofun. The haniwa fired here travelled only a few hundred metres to reach the tombs they were made to ornament.

Why a Kiln Site Became a National Historic Site

Japan protects thousands of National Historic Sites, and most of them are tombs, temple precincts, or castle grounds. Konda Shiratori is registered under a less familiar heading: remains connected with production and economic activity. It is, in everyday terms, an ancient industrial works.

That ordinariness is the point. The Furuichi mounds astonish visitors with their scale, but they say little about the labour that raised them. A keyhole tomb several hundred metres long required many thousands of haniwa standing in rows along its terraces, and every one of them had to be modelled, dried, and fired somewhere. Konda Shiratori is one of the rare places that records where. Investigations have identified at least ten kilns built into the slope, together with postholes interpreted as workshop buildings. The Agency for Cultural Affairs, in its designation, set out the reasoning plainly: a kiln complex standing inside one of the great cemeteries of ancient Japan, producing the objects used to furnish it.

A 1991 study by the Habikino City Board of Education sharpened the picture. Archaeologists examined the site's ash mound, the heap where cracked and misfired pieces were discarded, and recovered haniwa fragments dating from the late fifth to the early sixth century. The reject pile, in its way, is as informative as a finished tomb. It records the rhythm of a working pottery and the proportion of pieces that never survived the fire.

What the Ground Has Yielded

The fragments recovered here fall into two broad groups. Most numerous are cylindrical haniwa, the plain tubular forms set in close ranks to mark the boundaries of a mound. Alongside them came the more elaborate figurative haniwa, modelled in recognisable shapes: houses, shields, ceremonial parasols (kinugasa), quivers (yuki), horses, and water birds, as well as human figures.

Each of those shapes carried meaning. The cylinders defined sacred ground. The figurative pieces evoked the buildings, equipment, and animals that surrounded a ruler in life, assembled around the tomb as a kind of stage set for the funeral rites. To find them as raw fragments at the place of their making, rather than installed on a mound, is to catch the haniwa at an earlier moment in their story, before they had been carried out and set in place.

Visitors should know in advance that the site rewards understanding more than sightseeing. Much of the surrounding land has been built over with housing, and the kilns are not kept open to view. A section of the ground has been arranged as the Konda Shiratori Haniwa Production Site Park, where explanatory signboards describe what the excavations found. Those who want to see the haniwa themselves should pair the visit with the Habikino City Cultural Property Exhibition Room a short distance away, where pieces excavated from the Furuichi tombs and their surroundings are on display.

Around the Site

Konda Shiratori sits within easy reach of the monuments it once served. Konda Gobyoyama Kofun, the tomb attributed to Emperor Ojin, rises a short walk away, and Hakayama Kofun lies on the other side. Both belong to the Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2019 as Japan's twenty-third World Heritage property. The kiln site itself is a separately designated National Historic Site standing among them.

Close to Konda Gobyoyama is Konda Hachiman Shrine, whose treasure hall holds a celebrated set of gilt-bronze saddle fittings designated a National Treasure. A little further afield is the Hakucho-ryo Kofun, linked by legend to the hero Yamato Takeru and the white bird into which he was said to have transformed after death. The whole area lies near Furuichi Station on the Kintetsu Minami-Osaka Line, which makes a day spent walking between tombs entirely practical.