Important cultural property

Hasegawa Tohaku's Crows and Egrets, a pair of six-panel ink screens from around 1605, sets black crows against white egrets in monochrome. Where to see it today.

A Muromachi ink painting of the poet Li Bai watching a waterfall, inscribed by the Zen monk Ishō Tokugan around the early 1420s, the oldest such work in Japan.

At Tokyo's Artizon Museum, this Tokiwa scroll of the Heiji Monogatari Emaki paints the 1159 war apart from its famous kin, from Tokiwa's flight to a court purge.

Volume eight of the nine-scroll Shui Kotokuden, a Kamakura life of Honen, founder of Japan's Pure Land school, drafted in 1301 by Shinran's great-grandson Kakunyo.

This Kamakura-period handscroll, an Important Cultural Property in a private Tokyo collection, illustrates the diary of Murasaki Shikibu, author of Genji.

Discover the Rogan-zu (Reeds and Wild Geese) by Shūgetsu Tōkan, a designated Important Cultural Property of Japan. This Muromachi-period ink painting by a direct disciple of Sesshū captures the poetic beauty of autumn marshlands.

The Awaji no Kuni Ōtabumi is an original land register of Awaji Province created in April 1223, shortly after the Jōkyū War. Compiled under the direction of shugo Naganuma Munemasa on orders from regent Hōjō Yasutoki, it records the estates, public lands, and military stewards of the province's two districts. As one of the rarest surviving original ōtabumi from the Kamakura period, it is designated as an Important Cultural Property of Japan.

A single handscroll recording a waka poetry contest at the court of Emperor Daigo, hosted by a consort, preserving the verses and verdicts of a Heian gathering.

At Hannya-ji in Nara stand two granite kasa-tōba, stone memorial pillars raised in 1261 by I no Yukiyoshi for his late father and his still-living mother.

The Kachomon Kei is a Heian bronze ritual gong from Nara, decorated with flowers and birds and struck during Buddhist services as a signal. Designated in 1953.

Beneath the central pillar of a vanished Gango-ji pagoda lay gold, beads and eighth-century coins, unearthed in 1927 and now kept at the Nara National Museum.

Privately held in Nara, the Ki Clan Genealogy is a fourteenth-century scroll of one of Japan's oldest noble families. Its reverse hides a rare 1351 kana calendar.

Forty-one landscape panels by Sakaki Hyakusen, a pioneer of Japan's Nanga school, painted in 1751 near Nara and now on deposit at the Nara National Museum.

An Important Cultural Property in Nara: a bronze Buddhist chime cast in 1208 with paired peacocks, linked by hand to a National Treasure kei made the next year.

An Important Cultural Property in Nara, this Kamakura-period mandala on silk anchored the secret Ichiji Kinrin rite. Privately held, it is not on public display.

A twelfth-century Heian lacquer box for a court cap, worked in hyomon with silver and gold set flush into black lacquer. A Kasuga Taisha treasure that lost its lid.

An Important Cultural Property by Ogata Kenzan: a half-cylinder tea bowl with an iron-brown waterfall on one side and a poem on the other, both from his own brush.

The Sanzon Senbutsu is a fired-clay plaque of a seated Buddha and two standing attendants, designated in 1901 among the earliest protected objects in Japan.

An Important Cultural Property tachi forged in 1319 by Kyoto's Rai Kunitoshi, its slender form and quiet straight temper marking the smith's late style.

Kept above ground rather than buried, the two iron shields of Isonokami Jingu in Nara are rare, near-complete Kofun-period pieces and an Important Cultural Property.