Bronze Bell with a Kesata Design (said to Have Been

A Bronze Bell Engraved with Scenes of Yayoi Life

Sometime during the Edo period (1615–1868), a flattened bell-shaped object of green-grey bronze surfaced in Sanuki Province, the old name for what is now Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. No record preserves the exact spot where it was dug up, and for that reason its official designation still carries the cautious qualifier "purportedly excavated in Sanuki Province." The object is a dōtaku, a ritual bell cast during Japan's Yayoi period, and this example, dated to roughly the 2nd or 1st century BCE, ranks among the most studied bronzes in the country. It is kept today at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno.

A dōtaku is a hollow casting, thin-walled and shaped like a flattened cylinder that widens slightly toward its open base. A semicircular handle, the chū, rises from the top, and a narrow blade-like flange, the hire, runs down each side. Early dōtaku were small bells of around 20 centimetres, hung from a cord with a clapper inside so they could be sounded. Over the generations they grew larger and more decorative, and the sound gave way to display. Scholars summarise the shift with a neat phrase: from bells meant to be heard to bells meant to be seen.

The surface of this bell is what gives it its name. Raised lines cast in relief divide the upper three-quarters of the body, front and back, into six framed panels apiece, bounded by broad bands of diagonal lattice. The grid recalls the crossed sashes of a Buddhist monk's surplice, the kesa-dasuki, and so this whole class of bronze is called kesadasuki-mon dōtaku, the surplice-pattern bell. Sawtooth, spiral, and herringbone borders fill the remaining surfaces, all rendered in fine projecting line.

Why It Became a National Treasure

What sets this bell apart from the roughly six hundred dōtaku recovered across Japan is what fills those six panels. Around seventy dōtaku carry pictures, and this is among the finest of them. It was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1942 and raised to National Treasure status on 9 June 1951, the first dōtaku ever to receive that rank.

The bell also belongs to a small family of closely related castings. Two pictorial dōtaku unearthed at the Sakuragaoka site in Kobe, numbered 4 and 5, share almost identical decoration, as did a now-lost bell once owned by the Edo-period literati painter Tani Bunchō (1763–1840), known only through rubbings and sketches. The match is close enough that specialists assign all four to a single workshop and propose an order of casting: Sakuragaoka no. 5 first, then no. 4, then the Tani Bunchō bell, and this Kagawa example last. Walls only a few millimetres thick and a clean, sharp finish point to metalworkers of considerable skill.

Typologically the bell sits in the flat-handle stage of dōtaku development, and among examples of that stage it counts as a relatively late one. After casting, the lattice bands, the panels, and the lower hem were polished by hand. The dull green seen now is corrosion: when new, the bronze would have glowed a warm reddish gold.

Reading the Pictures

The two faces work almost like a pair of illustrated pages. One side runs, from the top, a dragonfly, a newt, an archer drawing his bow on a deer, a figure grasping an I-shaped implement that may be a spinning tool, a gable-roofed building raised on posts that is usually read as a granary, and a person working a pestle in a mortar. The other side carries a praying mantis, a spider, a soft-shelled turtle swallowing a fish, a heron with a fish in its beak, a turtle beside a lizard, and a hunter with dogs closing on a wild boar.

Look closely at the human figures and a small convention emerges. Heads drawn as circles are men; heads drawn as triangles are women. It is one of the earliest sex distinctions in Japanese visual art, scratched out in a few strokes of raised line.

The choice of subjects leans heavily toward water and rice. Dragonflies, herons, turtles, and the figures pounding grain and tending a raised storehouse all point to a community whose year turned on the wet-rice harvest. Beyond that, interpretation stays open. Why these scenes were placed on a bell, what the hunts and the granary meant to the people who cast it, and why dōtaku were so often buried in the earth are questions that still divide archaeologists.

Seeing It in Ueno

The bell is part of the Tokyo National Museum's archaeology collection, shown in the Heiseikan, the wing devoted to Japanese archaeology at the rear of the museum grounds. Because it is a National Treasure, it is not on permanent view; pieces of this rank are rotated to protect them and to share gallery space with other masterworks, so anyone making a special trip to see it should check the museum's current display listings in advance.

The museum sits inside Ueno Park, an easy walk from Ueno Station. The park packs several major institutions into a short stroll, including the National Museum of Nature and Science and the National Museum of Western Art, and its paths are famous for cherry blossoms in early spring and for the lotus-covered Shinobazu Pond to the south. A single afternoon can comfortably pair the dōtaku with one or two of these neighbours.