Sake Pourers with Crane and Tortoises

One flask of this pair has stencil-like paintings of three turtles—a young one with its parents—while the other has a crane with a leg raised. Cranes and turtles are well-recognized symbols of longevity in East Asia, with the turtle said to live for ten thousand years and the crane for one thousand.

Each flask also has a poem on the back, one in Chinese and the other in Japanese. The latter, which appears on the turtle flask, reads kame iwaku kamiyo wa, ore no wakaki toki. The seventeen-syllable poem begins with “turtle” and ends with “when I was young.” It can be translated as, “the turtle said the world of the gods began when I was young.”

The poem on the crane flask is two nonconsecutive five-character lines from a poem called “Crane Feelings” by the famous Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi (772–846). One character in one of the lines has been altered. This creative poetic sampling results in a verse reading zheng shi qun ji qian, tong you zhe tong zhi 爭食羣雞前，同遊者同志. It could perhaps be translated, “before the flock of chickens competing for food, those traveling together have the same ambitions.”