Autumn Grass Design Vase

The Jar with Autumn Grasses: A Heian Masterpiece in Clay

Three clusters of silver grass sweep across the belly of this tall stoneware jar, their slender blades cut into the wet clay with a few swift strokes of a bamboo tool. Above them, on the broad shoulder, a dragonfly hovers near a sprig of willow and a trailing melon vine. The whole surface reads like a patch of autumn field caught at the moment a breeze passes through it. This is the Akikusa-mon Tsubo, the "Jar with Autumn Grasses Design," and it stands among the most admired ceramic objects ever made in Japan.

The jar rises to about 40.6 centimeters. Its mouth opens outward in a trumpet flare, the shoulder swells generously, and the body tapers toward a flat foot. The clay is a pale grayish-white, semi-vitrified body, and across the shoulder a thin natural ash glaze has pooled in a soft olive tone, then run down the sides in irregular streaks where the kiln's flying ash melted against the heat. Nothing about the decoration was planned to be symmetrical. The grasses lean, the insects scatter, and the glaze fell where the fire willed it.

It belongs to the late Heian period, the twelfth century, a time when the refined court culture of Kyoto was beginning to give way to the rougher energies of the medieval age. The jar carries something of both worlds: the lyrical sensibility of Heian poetry written into the body of a sturdy provincial pot.

A Pot That Held the Dead

For all its beauty, this jar was never meant for display. It was buried in the earth as a cinerary vessel, holding the cremated bones of someone who lived around nine centuries ago. When it was found, the bones still rested inside; they were later removed and given a proper memorial burial.

Large jars of this kind served several purposes in Heian and early medieval Japan. Some were used to store grain or water in farming villages. Others were pressed into religious service: as outer containers for the bronze tubes that protected buried sutras in kyōzuka (sutra mounds), or, as here, as urns for the ashes of the dead. Cremation had spread among aristocrats and clergy from the Nara period onward, and a well-made jar from a respected kiln was a fitting resting place. The choice of autumn imagery for such a vessel carries a quiet resonance. Grasses going to seed and dragonflies at the close of summer are emblems of a season ending, and by extension of a life completed.

Where It Was Made: The Atsumi Kilns

For decades scholars debated where the jar was fired. An earlier view assigned it to the Tokoname kilns near the sea in Aichi. The prevailing opinion today attributes it to the Atsumi kilns, a cluster of medieval potteries spread across the Atsumi Peninsula in the same prefecture, in the area of present-day Tahara City. Both belonged to a new wave of high-firing kilns that emerged in the twelfth century, descended from the older Sanage tradition.

These workshops did not aim for the elegant glazed wares of the court. They made large, practical jars and grinding bowls for an agricultural society, fired hard in long climbing kilns dug into the hillsides. What sets this particular jar apart is the incised drawing. Most Atsumi vessels are plain. Here a potter took a thin blade and sketched grasses, willow, melon, and dragonflies with the loose confidence of a calligrapher, turning a utilitarian shape into a picture of the season.

What to Look For

The decoration is arranged in three loose bands, and reading them from top to bottom rewards a slow look.

On the neck, fine lines of grass mingle with darting dragonflies. The shoulder, framed by raised ridges and parallel grooves, carries the most careful work: blades of silver grass circling the pot, joined by willow fronds and a melon vine, all lifted into relief by the olive glaze that settled here most thickly. The body below is given over to three large, sweeping stands of grass, drawn with broader and freer strokes, so the eye moves from delicate detail at the top to bold gesture at the bottom.

Look closely at the inside edge of the mouth and you will find a single character, jō ("上," meaning "upper" or "top"), scratched into the clay before firing. Its exact purpose is uncertain. It may have been a maker's or workshop mark, or an instruction for orientation. Small marks like this are part of what makes the jar feel handmade rather than designed.

The silver grass itself, called susuki in Japanese, is the signature plant of the autumn field in Japanese poetry and painting. Centuries later the same theme would fill the gold screens of the Rinpa school, but this jar is one of its earliest surviving appearances in three dimensions. Standing before it, you are looking at an idea of autumn that has run through Japanese art for a thousand years.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The jar was unearthed in April 1942 during road and earth-moving work at the southern end of Kaseyama, a low plateau in Minami-Kase, Kawasaki, in Kanagawa Prefecture. The site lay close to Keio University's Hiyoshi campus, and the university, then carrying out archaeological surveys in the area under president Koizumi Shinzō, took the find into its keeping. It remains the property of Keio University to this day.

Recognition came quickly. The jar was designated an Important Cultural Property in February 1949 and elevated to National Treasure status in March 1953. By most accounts it was the first ceramic made in Japan to receive that highest rank, a marker of how seriously the country had come to regard its own early pottery. Its value lies in the rare combination of an accomplished pictorial design with the robust character of a medieval provincial kiln, and in its near-perfect condition after eight centuries underground.

Seeing the Jar and the Area Around It

The jar is held on long-term deposit at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park, where it is shown in the archaeology gallery on the first floor of the Heiseikan. Because National Treasures are rotated to protect them and to share gallery space, the jar is not on view year-round. Anyone making a special trip to see it should check the museum's current display listings in advance.

Ueno Park rewards a full day. The Tokyo National Museum alone holds roughly 120,000 objects across several buildings, and the surrounding park is home to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the National Museum of Nature and Science, and the National Museum of Western Art. The jar's original ground, the Kaseyama plateau in Kawasaki, lies southwest of central Tokyo near the Hiyoshi area and is reachable on the Tōkyū lines, though little of the wartime excavation remains visible today.