Important cultural property
重 要 文 化 財 一 覧Explore Japan’s Important Cultural Properties in one searchable list. Filter by prefecture, period, and category, read concise stories, and plan visits with maps and travel tips.
Uemura Shoen's near life-size mother and child, painted in 1934. An Important Cultural Property at MOMAT in Tokyo, it pictures a married woman of Meiji Kyoto.
A late sword guard by Tsuchiya Yasuchika, signed Tōu. In pierced suaka copper, drying fishing nets meet a flight of plovers, touched with his rubbed gold inlay.
Hosokawa Family Documents at Tokyo's Eisei Bunko: the 2013 designation of 266 papers holds 58 Oda Nobunaga letters; a 2025 addition raised the total to 9,612.
A Korean lacquer box, its black lid covered in a peony scroll of thick mother-of-pearl, a representative example of Joseon inlay brought to Japan by Ouchi trade.
Seven matched gold fittings of peonies and lions, attributed to Goto Yujo, mounted on a guardless short-sword scabbard assembled for the Kaga Maeda house in 1649.
A bokuseki scroll at the Tokyo National Museum: a verse brushed by the Southern Song Zen monk Beijian Jujian in a Suzhou pavilion in 1229, an early tea scroll.
A fragment of the Faju Piyu Jing copied in 4th-century China and dated to 359 CE by its colophon, among the oldest dated Chinese Buddhist manuscripts. Held in Tokyo.
Chinese poems and prose by Fujiwara no Tadamichi, the late-Heian chancellor. Copied in 1183 as war neared Kyoto, this early album is a key witness to his writing.
Volume 197 of the Hossō Ruirin, a Heian legal encyclopedia once said to fill over 200 volumes. This Kanazawa Bunko copy, made in 1304, is an Important Cultural Property.
Discover the Warikōdai Chawan, a 16th-century Korean tea bowl with a daringly cross-cut foot ring, designated an Important Cultural Property and housed at the Ebara Hatakeyama Museum in Shirokanedai, Tokyo. A masterpiece beloved by industrialist-tea master Hatakeyama Sokuō.
Kamakura-period scenes from the Koan version of the Kitano Tenjin scrolls at the Tokyo National Museum, an Important Cultural Property since 1956.
Takamura Koun's 1893 carving of an old monkey clutching eagle feathers, made for the Chicago World's Fair, at the Tokyo National Museum; an Important Cultural Property since 1999.
A 1710 farmhouse above the upper Akui River in Kamiyama Town, dated by its ridgepole tablet and designated in 1976 as the oldest six-room house plan in the district.
Built in 1630 opposite the thirteenth Shikoku pilgrimage temple, this three-bay shrine hall layers a dormer gable over a cusped one and keeps its polychrome carving.
The main hall of Ushihiko Shrine in Naruto, Tokushima, built in 1599, is a large three-bay nagare-style hall thought to be the oldest shrine hall in the prefecture.
The Great Pagoda of Kirihataji in Awa, Tokushima, built in 1618 at Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka and moved here in early Meiji, is a two-storey pagoda unique in Japan.
The Kannon hall of Jorokuji in Tokushima City, a hall of 1648 with two tiers of hipped tiled roof, is one of the four designated buildings of the temple.
The sutra repository of Jorokuji in Tokushima City, a former monks' hall of 1644 with an octagonal revolving sutra case, joined the other three on the list in 1998.
The main gate of Jorokuji in Tokushima City, a late Muromachi two-storey gate of three bays and three passages, is the oldest of the four designated buildings.
The main hall of Jorokuji in Tokushima City, built in 1629 as the abbot's quarters, is a broad hall under a tiled hip-and-gable roof, one of the temple's four.