Important cultural property

Calligraphy by the Southern Song Chan master Xutang Zhiyu on wax-coated paper, an Important Cultural Property prized as a tea-room scroll, privately held in Tokyo.

A short sword whose tang records its maker's own age. Umetada Myoju forged it at sixty-one in 1618, late in a career that helped open the new-sword era.

A broad, sturdy short sword by Kyoto smith Rai Kunimitsu, this Important Cultural Property belonged to Aizu lord Hoshina Masayuki and later to the Tokugawa shoguns.

This fifteenth-century pair of six-panel screens at the Tokyo National Museum is the oldest surviving Hamamatsu-zu, its mica ground glowing softly like moonlight.

The Albino sheet of the Yamai no Soshi, a 12th-century Buddhist handscroll, was cut from its parent scroll in 1796 and named an Important Cultural Property in 1938.

A pair of gold-ground folding screens at the Tokyo National Museum: a Namban ship unloading cargo, and a procession winding toward a hilltop Christian church.

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.