Photographs of 19th Century Japan
You'll probably enjoy this project https://hikaria.org/ we have been working on with the Guimet museum in Paris (https://www.guimet.fr/fr) to showcase 19th century Japanese photos.
We are building that website to oroganize various collections, and allow users to search through them using object detection (Clip model)
And this stuff is why I love either super creative science fiction or travelogues (and the formers are hard to find).
You can try to imagine a brand new world or simply try to re-live our real and past world. To me that is even more amazing, as it often can be the door to understanding some things of today's cultures and/or discover lost little worlds.
Currently I'm going through this book of a guy who cycled across Central Asia and in Japan. The guy is sometimes quite direct in his writing (unlike other writers) but it's so interesting to experience the world of just 100-200 years ago through the lens of one living there. I truly recommend it.
Having visited last year, the scenery around Toshogu Shrine in Nikko isn't all that different, if you manage to visit like we did first thing in the morning as soon as they open and before the tour buses rock up. (The shrine is surrounded by acres of sacred forest where construction is prohibited.)
The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
What a difference presentation makes. On Ops link I could enjoy scrolling through the photos, to see them on the Smithsonian site ,I had to find the "See all digital content in FSA.A1999.35" link then 4 clicks for each photo from a harsh index page.
Thank you to makers for putting the sites together, one for storage and the other for consumption.
Cool photos! My workplace is an old machiya [1] in Kyoto that's more than a hundred years old, so I kinda live like the people in these photos (not really of course - no konbini back then).
It's amazing to see pictures of feudal japan and think that some of the people who grew up there would be alive in the 1950s. Talk about witnessing progress.
The scenes really remind me of the painting "Along the River During the Qingming Festival"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_the_River_During_the_Qin...
The juxtaposition really brings out how isolationist they were back then. A country that is like a time capsule to the Tang dynasty
It's like if there was an island full of people still wearing Roman togas and going to the local hippodrome
The color detail of these pictures is so detailed and beautiful. Were they really hand colored? The color absolutely looks like something that would be computer generated. If they were indeed hand colored (when?), that would be an absolutely massive amount of painstaking work.
It looks like the other blog post linked to about the photos of the Russian Empire is behind a paywall, but the original Prokudin-Gorskii collection is available for free at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/prokudin-gorskii/about-this-...
Unlike these photographs from Japan, the ones from the Russian Empire were made with colored photographic plates and they were reassembled into true color photos and restored in the last few decades.
Sadly the photos from the Monsen American west collection seem to be guarded closely by Princeton and are not viewable to the public without requesting physical access. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/C1539
Edit: Looks like much of the Monsen Ethnographic Indian Photographs Portfolio can be found in the Huntington digital library: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll2/se... - content warning!
What did we do to our world.
The photo titled "Thief, outside of mosquito-net." really piqued my interest.
What surprised me the most is the picture of the Buddhist Monks. I've always associated them with those orange robes, but the patchwork of bright colours almost makes me think of a kids show host. Is this something that has evolved over time, or is it like a rank thing? Apologies for my ignorance
If this tickles your pickle, there's a beautiful, large book put out by Taschen called Japan 1900 that you might want to check out! I have a copy and I love it. It just can't actually go on my coffee table since I have three kids under ten running around throwing juice and crumbs and handprints everywhere.
https://www.taschen.com/en/books/photography/41412/japan-190...
They look like a video game. There arent enough NPCs. These are idealized images, akin to tourist photos. The seem to be taken in the early morning, before the crowds of people appear. The bell is perhaps the best example. Just think of the industry needed to mine and forge all that metal. These streets should be crammed with people but it looks like a town from Oblivion: massive constructions inhabited by a handful of residents. These are great photos, somewhat limited by the camera tech of the time, but I would like to see more typical scenes.
That's a nice collection of photographs.
Here are some written accounts of Japan during that period:
It's interesting that in the photo of three girls, they are smiling broadly. I had thought that traditional Japanese culture (and still, often, today) women tended to cover their mouths, and displaying teeth was considered somewhat vulgar or even obscene. At one point, women even blackened their teeth!
Maybe that wasn't universal, or the photographer convinced the women to show their smiles.
It would be great if there were photos of today for some of these old photos, especially for structures/places/scenery that still exists.
>I’m once again struck by the fact that none of the people in these images are still with us. If any of them somehow returned to the land of the living, I’m not sure they’d recognise the Japan of today.
On the other hand, if someone sees one of this pictures without any explanation, he will recognize it's made in Japan.
I think Japan changed, but not so much.
Ghibli's films, especially Neighbour Totoro, depict Japan in the 1960s, and it is often muttered by old people after watching Hayao Miyazaki's films that this was the best point of landscape and modern affluence.
What is the story of the 'letter carrier'?
In case anyone is wondering whether these are real colour photographs, the answer is no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring#Japanese_hand-c...
Striking how clean and organized everything looks in the photos. It's really ingrained in the Japanese psyche.
> I’m once again struck by the fact that none of the people in these images are still with us.
Sometimes I think about that when watching an older movie.
Goes without saying, all the people on these photos are now all dead. And their children too. Zooming in and studying their faces, it strikes me how similar we are to them, and yet so different.
Wow! Spectacular images!
Seeing the captured images, instead of drawings or verbal description, is such a window back in time.
Lovely pictures, especially liked the one of the room with the carpet, tea set, and table at the window. Everything low on the floor.
Beautiful. That must have been a lot of work hand-coloring those photos.
wow, my great grandfather fought in WWI, got captured and went through Russia, Japan, Hawaii, Panama and back to Europe. He collected postcards like these, we still have them
What amazes me is the quality of these pictures. Are they digitally restored?
It's like painting made by human, not photo captured by camera.
Nikkō Road seems like it would have flooding issues. I wonder how they avoided that.
There's something about seeing real people from that far back
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They’re lovely, thank you!
The mailman had a pretty wild costume
Quite a few of those still exist!
* Wysteria Vine. It is not written, but I am pretty sure it's Kameido Shrine. You need to come at the right time to see flowers like that though.
* Nikko All pictures that show shrine and pagoda
* Osaka Castle
* Daibutsu, at Kamakura
* Jinrikishia Now it's for tourists, but you can ride in Asakusa.
* View Ojigoku on Great Boiling Springs, Hakone.
* Wrestlers. Sumo still exists and looks like that.
* Gion Machi Street, at Kyoto. Looks a bit different, but there are still many old houses like this.
* View of Nara.
* Tennojo Buddhist Temple
* Hakone Lake of Fujiyama
What does not exist anymore is any picture showing a town or village. I feel sad about this. There are a very few places that kept this (E.g. Shirakawago). Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.