Haniwa, literally meaning “clay rings,” take their name from the unglazed clay cylinders placed around the burial mounds of the Japanese elite beginning in the fourth century during the Kofun period. Originally simple tubular forms sunk into the earth for stability, they gradually evolved into sculptural representations of humans, animals, houses, and other objects associated with daily life. Constructed using coil-and-slab techniques, the figures were smoothed with bamboo combs and refined with knives or spatulas before being dried and low-fired, producing their characteristic warm buff or reddish tones.
The imaginative landscape of My Neighbor Totoro (lot 32) likewise draws upon Japan’s distant past. The film’s forest spirits evoke the mythic atmosphere associated with the prehistoric Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun periods. In a LINE LIVE discussion with Oshii Mamoru and Kawakami Nobuo, Suzuki Toshio recalled that in Miyazaki Hayao’s early conception, Totoro and the other spirits were imagined as survivors of an ancient conflict between humans and the Totoro tribe in prehistoric Japan. Seen in this context, the creatures appear less as purely whimsical inventions than as echoes of a primordial world, suggestive of the animistic sensibilities that shaped Japan’s earliest cultural imagination.