Kakiemon — the Japanese porcelain style characterised by asymmetric designs in soft red, turquoise, blue, and black on a milky-white ground — appears in poems about eighteenth-century European collecting as the most prized of the Eastern imports; A poem about Augustus the Strong of Dresden — who traded a regiment of soldiers for a collection of Meissen and Japanese porcelain — might describe his Kakiemon pieces: "the white ground so pure it seemed to need no decoration, and so the decoration was used sparingly, as if with restraint"; European factories at Meissen and Chantilly imitated Kakiemon so closely that poems about originality and copying might use it as a central example; In a poem about a still life, Kakiemon's asymmetric arrangement of a single branch with a bird suits the Japanese aesthetic of empty space as active presence: "what the painter left unpainted held as much meaning as the branch"; The milky-white Kakiemon ground — called "nigoshide" — appears in poems about purity and the ground against which beauty is measured; A poem about a Japanese-English cultural exchange might describe a Kakiemon bowl as the object that each side misread productively: Japan making it, Europe desiring it, Meissen copying it — the bowl meanwhile indifferent to all three interpretations.