Abstract
This article discusses bird-shaped haniwa that were placed on kofun burial mounds in Kofun period Japan. These bird haniwa include chickens, waterfowl, cormorants, hawks, and cranes or herons. In this paper, I analyze the morphology of these haniwa in comparison with the actual shape and ecology of these birds.
Haniwa chickens are found from the very beginning of the custom of placing these sculptures on tombs and they continue right through the period of haniwa use. Their numbers are also much greater than finds of other birds. Haniwa chickens are found from Kagoshima to Iwate Prefectures, a distribution that is more or less the same as the distribution of kofun with haniwa.
Bird-shaped haniwa differ as to the time of their appearance and their locations on tombs depending on the type of bird. This means that all birds did not play the same role but that their significance probably differed depending on the type of bird. Bird-shaped haniwa cannot be considered as one group but must be seen separately depending on the bird. In order to classify these haniwa, therefore, this article considers the ways in which the characteristics of the actual birds are represented in haniwa form. Since they are all birds, there are certain shared features common to the whole category, but there are also differences in expression than can be used to differentiate different types of bird. If one looks in detail at the expression of each part of the body, early examples use actual birds as models but before long the stylistic expression becomes fixed and in the majority of cases the sculpture was made based on bird-shaped haniwa rather than the birds themselves. The types of birds also became limited and it was not possible to freely represent birds in haniwa form.
