Haniwa (Right Panel)

Haniwa (Right Panel) is the second of the 1916 pair of hanging scrolls by Tsuji Kakō in ink and color on paper, complementing the Left Panel in a single coordinated composition of Kofun-period clay figures. As a pair, the scrolls reflect the early twentieth-century Japanese rediscovery of haniwa as an emblematic subject of indigenous antiquity, parallel to similar engagements with Yayoi pottery, dōtaku bronze bells, and prehistoric Japanese stone tools that Taishō-period archaeologists and ethnographers were cataloguing across the islands. Kakō's right-panel figures are drawn with the same Maruyama-Shijō attention to individual posture and weathered surface as the left-panel companion, demonstrating his ability to extend the school's habits of close drawing — developed in his apprenticeship under Kōno Bairei — to non-traditional subjects requiring the painter's adaptive observation rather than the standard kachō-e or landscape repertoire. The scrolls are an important example of the way Kyoto nihonga of the 1910s engaged with archaeological as well as natural and decorative subjects, and they help locate Kakō within the wider intellectual currents of Taishō-period Japan.