Photographs of 19th Century Japan
cosmographia.substack.com
cosmographia.substack.com
* 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.
You can still see a few of these houses and their traditional gardens in some of the wealthy, old-money smelling parts of Kyoto.
When I visited Japan last year most of my pictures were of old "crummy" looking buildings and older homes. They had character vs the modern flat buildings popping up all over. I even snapped pictures of the overhead wiring, utility poles and building connections. I now understand the prevalence of overhead wires and utility poles in manga/anime. I even read a white paper on Tepco's commitment to move as much of these old overhead wires underground.
> “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing,” he says, “The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”
https://time.com/3802766/r-crumbs-snapshots-source-material-...
I don't have a reference for it (it might be from the film "Crumb") but I remember him saying that people would rave about how he artistically exaggerated the proliferation of poles, signage, and overhead lines to create over-the-top dystopian images, when he was just copying backgrounds from photographs of suburban California.
We are building that website to oroganize various collections, and allow users to search through them using object detection (Clip model)
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.
I'll plug Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands as an extraordinary deep dive into a world that's entirely disappeared in our lifetimes:
Both books (not just Japan, he cycled around the world): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1710
Sure, it's kind of superficial, usually based on human civilizations / design trends / etc; that is:
* Heavensward: Europe / traditional knights and castles and church stuffs
* Stormblood: East-Asia / Japan, clearly a favorite thing to work on from the developers
* Shadowbringers: is actually pretty independent
* Endwalker: Rome / Greece on the one side, India on the other, philosophical existential crises in the late game (that part is actually really good, they invented multiple (7-8 or so?) different civilizations who all achieved some kind of immortality and pursued the meaning of life, ending up disillusioned)
* Dawntrail (latest): south & mesoamerica on the one side, cyberpunk sci-fi on the other
Instead travelogues are not that, they are not about being perfect or beautiful, it's about the places and people being as they are, however they are.
Didn't try all ths games you mentioned, I will take a look. Thanks!
Go on, give us a clue. Title, author, even language...?
The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
getting utterly destroyed by fire bombing (or atomic bombs in the case of Nagasaki) does that to cities.
Side note: I quickly checked the dedede project and I'm so enthralled with it! I will use it to improve my Japanese, thank you!
Thank you to makers for putting the sites together, one for storage and the other for consumption.
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
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
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!
- Countries now thought it IS okay to invade other countries just to make themselves bigger/stronger countries: There are currently many examples in the news.
- Nationalism, racism, sexism are the norm: Nationalism is obviously on the rise. Racism never disappeared, even being tattooed is seen as an excuse to deport people.
https://azmirror.com/2025/04/08/ice-director-envisions-amazo...
- Women and men are much more sexualized today than in my youth, despite the talk of feminism and #metoo.
- Most people can't read/write (see Piza results). Only 10% of people can understand a simple statistics.
- Information is scant (see social networks and disinformation)
For context, about my post, I am from France, and what I wrote is not specific to any country but seems to me to apply to all.
In particular I'm happy to live in a modern, well-insulated home with climate control. Transportation is also a lot more convenient with cars, trains, and airplanes. And clothing and fashion of the day also looks very uncomfortable to me.
Some of the nature scenes look lovely. But there are still plenty of places in Japan where you can experience the same sense of natural beauty and solitude.
You’d certainly prefer to live in Japan in 2025 than in 1860.
https://www.meijishowa.com/photography/6451/190102-0009-pp-b...
https://sekiei.nichibun.ac.jp/KSA/en/detail/?gid=G0203359
https://www.album-online.com/detail/en/NDAzZGUwMA/two-buddhi...
There's also more information about the exact version from the article here [1], although it doesn't clarify whether the photographer and the person who colorized it are separate people.
[1] https://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/dglib/contents/learn/edc28/shiru/...
https://www.taschen.com/en/books/photography/41412/japan-190...
Here are some written accounts of Japan during that period:
Maybe that wasn't universal, or the photographer convinced the women to show their smiles.
They had long since disappeared by the time the photographs were taken, replaced with uniformed men on bicycles. In the past though, they ran express mail in relays with a partner who carried a torch.
https://www.oldphotosjapan.com/photos/882/19th-century-japan...
as well as the wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikyaku
I didn't see anything about tattoos or the eye makeup, but the loincloth definitely came up. That was their typical clothing, regardless of weather, although I find kind of hard to believe.
I wonder how easy it is to run distances carrying a pole?
>I didn't see anything about tattoos or the eye makeup, but the loincloth definitely came up. That was their typical clothing, regardless of weather, although I find kind of hard to believe.
Maybe that was just while they were running? And the way station provided some warm clothing when they stopped?
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.
I have read a book written in the early 20th century by an American at that time who had spent most of his life in Japan and who described what life was life was in Japan at the time. If you remove the technological change, culturally and traditionally, Japan is pretty much the same country as several generations back, and I was struck by that.
> They were originally shot in black and white, then hand-coloured by artists — a technique common at the time.
Sometimes I think about that when watching an older movie.
Seeing the captured images, instead of drawings or verbal description, is such a window back in time.
We're actually creating new unique and diverse cultures by adopting and remixing parts of the various cultures we encounter. Just looking at photos from other cultures (as you have done today) is a part of that process. This is a good thing. Some of my favorite things are different takes on a thing that came from another culture. Diversity really does make us stronger and it makes our lives richer. While it might be neat to see what results from cultures being totally isolated, I think it'd be much more interesting to see what results from bringing those cultures together.
The truth is that none of those "unique and diverse cultures" you're mourning the loss of came from anything different. Even japan's culture, although it was one of the more isolationist nations, was still massively influenced by other people/places. Technology accelerates the process, but the process itself is unchanged. It made 19th century japan what it was then, just like it made japan what it is now. It's just what humans do and always have done. There's no reason to feel sad about it.
And it used to be partially done by empires, wiping out local traditions. And powerful warlords would do it, too. Monarchs, etc. Hard to say Western Europe doesn't look the way it does in large part because of this multicontinental, millennia-old institution called the Catholic Church!
It hasn't changed much; in theory everyone has a camera in their pocket now to record the mundane, but in practice a lot of it is "content", where people put on a show for the camera.
My grandpa was an amateur photographer, he'd go out and make photos of local events, scenes, people, etc. His work has been donated to a regional museum and digitized, because there was little other visual records of these old (well, 50's) traditions.
I can't find them though. Some were uploaded to a Facebook page but that's a really poor platform for archiving / displaying works. I should reach out to my dad and start a project to build a website for this collection or something like that.
Poor people were not hidden away, it's just their lives weren't that beautiful to be shown and paraded around.
It isn't like we don't have records of ordinary people, even the homeless, or criminals. It's more like people like you claim the existence of a whole another kind of "poor people", who were supposedly the absolute majority, who suffered somewhere, completely ignored by everybody, and worked long hours every day on... being poor? It just doesn't seem to add up.
But over the years I have come to realise that I'm very odd.
When you go on holiday, how many photos do you take of regular people, vs. tourist attractions? Or, in reverse, do you know regular people[1] who often find tourists visiting their area like to take photos of their homes?
[0] When I visited Nairobi a decade back, one of my photos was along the lines of this Google Street View image: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2811367,36.9148575,3a,75y,17...
[1] This site being what it is, there's a decent chance you know someone world-famous and people do actually want photos of their home. They're not "regular people".
The same during the Korean War he was a pilot in.
To be fair though, these photos are breathtaking. Pre-industrial era Japan is a place I'd love to visit and the history of this transformation is steeped in fear, modernizing in response to Western powers (look up Matthew Perry—naval officer, not the actor lol).
The alternative is a sort of re-enactment/cosplay approach where people consciously try to keep local traditions and minority languages (e.g. Gaelic, Sami) alive.
Air travel is faster than horse, and carries more people.
How you do that without being outright racist is the tough part.
And I say this as a migrated child of migrants.
But is that a good thing?
And if it is, should we be trying to promote it elsewhere where immigrant imposition does occur? And how?!
For that matter, how did those coffee shops displace tea rooms?
What does "defend" mean?
> against immigrants imposing their cultures
How can a minority "impose" its culture?
> How you do that without being outright racist
You can start by not saying "defending" and "imposing". There's no attack. "Defending" only means enjoying and promoting all the elements of your existing culture - language, music, entertainment, food, dress, architecture, religious and other traditional celebrations.
Immigrants like to be part of the mainstream so most of them will participate, unless made to feel unwelcome, usually bringing some of their own food to the party (always a plus).
> What does "defend" mean?
Keep it from being replaced by another culture. I think we all understand that.
> How can a minority "impose" its culture?
By being locally dominant. By catering to people from their own community who prefer not to join the local culture. By providing cheaper/better/more profitable things to the locals than the local culture does.
A big aspect of authenticity is uniqueness and modern culture and political thought are absolutely counter-aligned to this idea.
He'd import culture from other places he was stationed. He adopted the German custom of an after-lunch nap, which I still do.