National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

The name “Kameyama Segments” (kameyama-gire) refers to segmented parts of a copy of the Anthology of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems (Kokin wakashū) that was transcribed in the mid-Heian period. It owes its name to its provenance: this work was once owned by the Matsudaira family, who governed the Kameyama domain in the province of Tanba during the Edo period (17th–19th century). Later on, the segments passed into the hands of tea practitioner and entrepreneur Masuda Takashi (also known as Donnō; 1848–1938). Today, different segments are owned by different organizations.

Kyushu National Museum owns segment number four, which comprises 17 pages containing 39 poems, making it the most substantial of all the segments. Some notable features of this particular segment are in how it opens with the title “Anthology of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poems, Vol. 2 on its first page, as well as how it contains poems not included in the most commonly cited edition (known as the Teika edition); the latter point, in particular, makes it a work of high research interest.

While it is likely that these pages had originally been folded into signatures and sewn together at the crease (tetsuyōsō binding), they are currently mounted onto individual panels of an accordion-style album (orijōsō binding). Each page has been decorated with a sprinkle of finely milled mica powder; some pages bear additional light blue fiber decorations either on both the top and bottom, or just the bottom. Papers that have been decorated this way are known as kumogami (lit., “cloud paper”). The ones used in this work are particularly soft and give off a sense of transparency, evoking a pure, elegant image of clouds drifting in the sky. The detailed, beautiful, and dynamic brushstrokes that render the poetry on the pages in this collection make it one of the greatest masterpieces of Heian calligraphy.