It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Professor Tatsuo Kobayashi, Senior Advisor on Archaeology at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, and Honorary Director of the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History, of which he was Director from its opening in 2000 to 2007. Professor Kobayashi would have been 88 in November this year.
Professor Kobayashi had a profound impact on his field of specialisation, the archaeology of the Jōmon period. He applied the newly-developing approach of settlement archaeology to the prehistoric landscapes being discovered in advance of the development of the Tama New Town in western Tokyo in the 1960s. His studies of Jōmon ceramics, settlement, monuments and landscapes, illuminated by concepts such as the socialisation of nature and duality in Jōmon societies, and often illustrated by the many artists he knew and supported, largely redefined what we know of the Jōmon period.
He was a passionate advocate for Japanese archaeology, in particular of the Jōmon. His edited volumes 縄文土器大観[Corpus of Jōmon Pottery, 4 volumes,1988-1989] and 総覧縄文土器 [Overview of Jōmon Pottery, 2008, 1322 pages] continue to be the benchmarks for any study of Jōmon pottery. As well as generating a multitude of specialist reports and other publications, Kobayashi was dedicated to disseminating understanding of Jōmon archaeology to a wide audience, in Japan and around the world. His books for a general readership included 縄文人の世界 [The World of the Jōmon People, 1996] which was published in translated and adapted form as Tatsuo Kobayashi’s Jomon Reflections (2005).
Kobayashi played a central role in the early stages of the process of nominating 17 Jōmon sites in northern Tohoku and southern Hokkaido as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He led a delegation of academic and local government specialists to the Japanese Embassy to UNESCO in Paris in January 2012, giving an accompanying keynote address at the Maison de la culture du Japon.
He inspired and advised on the construction of a new generation of museums and museum displays. A visit to the impressive Jōmon galleries of the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History is like an immersive experience of his Jōmon Reflections. Visitors walk through massive dioramas of various aspects of Jōmon landscapes at different seasons: hunting and gathering taking place in the forests, coastal shell middens and a Jōmon village complete with pit dwellings, drying pottery waiting to be fired, and semi-domesticated wild boar. He advised on the establishment of many other museums, including the Najōmon experimental archaeology centre in Tsunan, Niigata, and the Goshono site museum in Iwate. The last museum with which he was closely involved was the Fukui Cave Museum, close to the site where pottery fragments were found in association with obsidian microliths, securely situated in deposits dated to some 12,000 years ago, astonishingly early when discovered in the 1960s. He was delighted when this site, with which he had a long-standing involvement, was designated a Site of Special National Importance [特別史跡in 2024.
Born in 1937 in Nagaoka, the former provincial capital of Echigo in the heart of Japan’s ‘snow country’, now Niigata prefecture, Kobayashi developed an early love for nature and the remains of the ancient past that he detected all around him. Just a year before he was born, fragments of what became known as ‘Flame pottery’ were recovered from the Umataka site in Nagaoka. It was these Flame pots that inspired the surrealist artist Okamoto Taro to declare that Jōmon pottery deserved to be regarded as great art, a theme that Kobayashi was to pursue through his own long career. Visiting the British Museum around the time of the Power of Dogu exhibition there, Kobayashi was disappointed by the poor representation of Jōmon pottery in the displays, a situation he rapidly rectified by arranging for long-term loans of a series of Flame pots from Niigata, which can be seen in the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries. This mutually beneficial arrangement was marked by the exhibition Flame and Water Pots in the Asahi Gallery at the Museum.
Following his studies at Kokugakuin University, Kobayashi joined the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 1970, where he progressed to Principle Investigator in the Cultural Properties Department before returning to the Faculty of Literature at Kokugakuin in 1978, where he became Professor of Archaeology in 1985, the post he retained till his retirement in 2008. He travelled widely, including through southeast Asia and north America. He developed a particular interest in the northwest coast of America, acquiring a holiday home near Vancouver. His mentor, the great pioneer of Jōmon pottery studies Yamanouchi Sugao, had regarded the Jōmon as comparable to the culturally and socially complex indigenous societies of the northwest coast.
Kobayashi spent a year in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1993-1994, during which time he developed a close interest in archaeoastronomy, and compiled an impressive collection of postcards of Stonehenge, along with an astonishing variety of British beer cans. Upon his return to Japan he led a major research project into the astronomical alignments of Jomon monuments with significant mountain peaks in the surrounding landscapes, published in two seminal volumes both titled 縄文ランドスケープ [Jōmon Landscapes] (2002 and 2005). He visited Stonehenge and many other British and European archaeological sites, leading a number of tours to introduce his colleagues to international archaeology. He was particularly pleased with the exhibition Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre in 2022-2023.
This was the final exhibition involving Kobayashi presenting Jōmon archaeology to international audiences. He had worked closely with Richard Pearson on the Ancient Japan exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1992. In 2001, as part of the Japan 2001 festival of Japanese culture in the UK, he curated Flaming pots: art and landscape in prehistoric Japan, an exhibition focused on Flame pots to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. At the accompanying conference on the Oldest Pottery in the World we were introduced to the latest discoveries of the earliest dated ceramic containers, from Odai Yamamoto in Aomori and a series of sites along the Shinano River, including Jin, which Kobayashi had excavated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He contributed to the large-scale exhibition of Japanese archaeology held in Germany in 2004, Zeit der Morgenröte, and to two major Jōmon exhibitions at the Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris. The catalogue for the former included a foreword by Claude Levi-Strauss of the Academie Francaise. Kobayashi advised on two major exhibitions of Jōmon dogū, The Power of Dogu: ceramics figures from ancient Japan at the British Museum in 2009 and unearthed at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in 2010, and a further exhibition of Flame pots at the Embassy of Japan to the UK in London, part of a bid to have the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Cauldron designed after a Flame pot.
Kobayashi was also active on the international conference scene. He took part in meetings of the Society for American Archaeology, not least for a special session in 2004 on the commission he led on the Early Palaeolithic fakery incident. He brought a group of colleagues to the UK on the first of a number of tours of British archaeological sites to coincide with the 1995 conference From the Jōmon to Star Carr, the first major meeting of European Mesolithic and Japanese Jōmon archaeology specialists at the universities of Cambridge and Durham. In 2012 he led another such tour to the painted Palaeolthic caves of the Dordogne and the megalithic sites of Brittany in France. He was instrumental in setting up the world’s first twinned archaeological sites in 2016, the Neolithic Flint Mines of Grimes Graves in Norfolk and the prehistoric obsidian mines of Nagawa-machi in Nagano, an arrangement which has seen many bilateral visits between high school students and civic dignitaries. From 2003-2006 he directed the Origins of Early Pottery Project and from 2004-2007 the Origins of Shinto Centre of Excellence Project, initiatives that took him to the Russian Far East to visit early pottery sites around the Amur River Valley. He undertook a comprehensive study of the Jōmon materials held in the National Museums of Scotland, part of the Munro Collection.
He welcomed many international students and colleagues on his excavations and to his office at Kokugakuin. There were many unforgettable evenings perched on a collection of rickety old chairs as local specialities from around Japan were consumed, washed down by plentiful beer, sake and shōchū, provided by the generations of archaeologists for whom Kobayashi had secured jobs. He was an advisor to the International Jōmon Culture Conference, an organisation established by philanthropist Handa Haruhisa, which offers scholarships for young Jōmon specialists to spend time at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. In 1990 he received the Hamada Seiryū Award, the most prestigious prize in Japanese archaeology. In 2023 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Cultures. He is survived by his wife Mitsuko, son, daughter and grandchildren.