Notes from Gifu

While riding through Gifu Park recently, I happened to stop by a small building at the northwest corner of the park that used to be a souvenir shop. It is now a display area about the current archaeological digs being made in the park. Nobunaga Oda used to live here in the sixteenth century, when he was trying to unite Japan under his leadership. Recently they found the site of a house of a low-ranking samurai that served Nobunaga, and the artifacts of that site are on exhibit in the display area.

Looking at these artifacts, I noticed a box of broken fragments of interesting clay sake bottles. My first reaction to the fragments was how new they looked. It turns out that these particular date back to the Meiji Era (1868 to 1912) and Taisho Era (1912 to 1926), but they looked like they could have been broken fragments from today. Even if the fragments are only 80+ years old, they still look a lot newer. That shows the preservative powers of being buried in dirt. My second reaction was the realization that not all artifacts found on a site will necessarily be from the most famous era of that area. There was life at the site before that era and afterwards.