Nara

Discover the $11 million Yuteki Tenmoku tea bowl at Osaka's Museum of Oriental Ceramics. This 12th-century Song Dynasty masterpiece features mesmerizing oil-spot patterns and stands as Japan's only National Treasure-designated Yuteki Tenmoku. Complete visitor guide included.

Experience one of only three surviving Yohen Tenmoku tea bowls in the world at Osaka's Fujita Museum. This 12th-century National Treasure displays mysterious cosmic patterns that modern science cannot reproduce, valued at 1.7 billion yen.

Discover the gilt-bronze epitaph of Ishikawa no Toshitari, a National Treasure of Japan dating to 762 CE. This exquisite Nara period funerary inscription reveals the life of a Soga clan nobleman and offers rare insight into ancient Japanese burial customs.

Discover the Excavated Items from the Yokoi Temple Ruins in Yamato Province, an Important Cultural Property of Japan housed at the Osaka Museum of History. Unearthed from a long-vanished Nara-period temple in Nara City, the collection includes a gilt-bronze standing Bodhisattva, a Tang-influenced mountain-cloud double luan-bird mirror, ancient bronze coins, and other ritual metalwork that vividly evoke eighth-century Buddhist devotion.

The National Treasure Senju Kannon at Fujiidera Temple in Osaka has 1,041 real hands, each palm once painted with an eye. Shown only on the 18th of each month.

The National Treasure celadon vase 'Bansei', fired at Southern Song China's Longquan kilns, passed from an empress to a Kyoto temple before reaching Izumi, Osaka.

A ninth-century Tang manuscript of China's first dictionary survives in Osaka as a National Treasure. See its seal-script columns at the Kyou Shooku library.

Osaka's Kyou Shooku library holds eleven Song-printed volumes of the Shiji jijie, the oldest Shiji commentary, a National Treasure once owned by Naito Konan.

Printed in Southern Song China in 1139, these 17 National Treasure volumes of the Maoshi zhengyi rest at Kyo-U Library in Osaka with Kanazawa Bunko seals.

Copied around 770 and once kept at Nara's Yakushiji, 387 National Treasure sutra scrolls survive at Osaka's Fujita Museum. Seals, mountings, visiting tips.

The Tobiseiji Hanaike at the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, is a National Treasure regarded as the finest surviving example of Chinese Yuan-dynasty Longquan celadon with iron-spot decoration. Standing 27.3 cm tall in the elegant yuhuchun form, twenty-one iron spots dance across its jade-green glaze. Discover this masterpiece treasured in Japan for centuries through the Konoike merchants and the famed Ataka Collection.

A herdboy rides his ox home through falling snow in Li Di's Returning Herd in Snow, a Southern Song National Treasure kept at Nara's Yamato Bunkakan museum.