関東の鉈彫について

Wood statues showing numerous marks of carving with a round chisel on their surfaces are collectively called by art historians as “nata-bori” (hatchet carving). There have been two different theories regarding the nata-bori : one insisting that the nata-bori statues are unfinished works; and the other, that they are not unfinished pieces but that they represent a certain style which was in vogue in a certain period. The present writer prefers the latter. In his studies on the nata-bori, the writer tried a method different from those of previous scholars. Discussions on nata-bori heretofore have mostly been focused on respective individual statues ; they picked up a particular statue and discussed whether it was a finished work or an unfinished piece. The writer studied what was the percentage of the nata-bori statues to the total number of old wood statues existing in the Kantă district; and if, as a matter of hypothesis, they were unfinished works, whether or not there were any finished statues of this kind. It has been known that, strangely enough, the distribution of nata-bori statues is limited to eastern half of Japan, from Aichi Prefecture in the west to Aomori Prefecture in the north, the Kanto district (the area around Tokyo) being the centre. None at all exists in the Kansai district and westward. The majority of the specimens are found in the Kanto. The writer, therefore, visited all and every old examples of ichiboku (“single wood-block”) sculpture in the Kanto district, and made chronological, stylistic and technical studies on them. Of the forty-one ichiboku statues in the district considered to date from the Heian Period, eight are nata-bori works, occupying slightly less than one fifth of the total number. It is of course highly possible that more specimens of ichiboku sculpture will be discovered in the Kanto district in future, but it is not probable that a great change will take place in the above-mentioned ratio. Is it not unnatural to call all these nata-bori pieces, covering nearly twenty percent of the total, as “unfinished” works? Furthermore, the examples displaying this (probably intended) rough surface finish remain only in the regions centering around the Kantō, none having ever been found even in such remote localities as Kyūshū and Shikoku; moreover, all these are Buddhist statues made in about the tenth to twelfth centuries. These facts lead the writer to believe that the nata-bori was a peculiar style of wood carving which flourished in the Kantō cultural sphere in the Heian Period.