—Acknowledgments—
There are many people I would like to thank for their help and support in writing this book. Clark Worswick first suggested the idea, and it was he who inspired my interest in early Japanese photography when I came across his volume Japan Photographs: 1854-1905 sixteen years ago.
There are many collectors in the United States, Japan, and Europe who share my interest in nineteenth-century Japanese photography and from whom I have learned much. These include Dietmar Siegert, Fred Sharf, Dr. Henry Rosin, and Professor Himeno Jun'ichi. I am grateful to Shimazu Kimiyasu for permission to reproduce his ancestor's photograph and to Izakura Naomi for translations from Japanese texts, both Meiji and modern. My secretary, Maureen Playford, is to be thanked for performing the time-consuming task taken by typing the manuscript.
I am indebted to Elena Dal Pra and Fred Sharf for information on Adolfo Farsari. I am also grateful to Hans Schreiber and Dr. Bernhard Stillfried for information on Baron von Stillfried. I offer a special thanks to collector and researcher Torin Boyd, who provided me with ideas and access to his collection of photos from the bakumatsu, or last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, and the Meiji era. He has also identified for the first time a number of photographs taken by the elusive Shimooka Renjo.
Sebastian Dobson wrote the introductory essay and a number of the captions. He gave much encouragement and constructive criticism and helped with the translation of some troublesome Japanese names. He also assisted in searching out some obscure Japanese sources that yielded new and surprising information.
—Preface—
My subject in this book is the early history of photographic images in Japan and the photographers, both Japanese and Western, who took them. I have been less concerned with photographic processes, types, or equipment.
I have tried to pull together scattered pieces of information about early Japanese photography from both Western and Japanese sources, though the latter have proved especially troublesome. Japanese photographic literature is littered with unattributed statements and opinions. Primary-source material is rare. References are often vague, incomplete, and unreliable. Accordingly, although Japanese sources have been quoted, Western sources have proved to be surprisingly more fruitful.
But in English too the subject of early Japanese photography is not well documented, and nothing comprehensive seems to have appeared since Clark Worswick's 1979 pioneering work, Japan Photographs: 1854-1905. For many years I myself have been interested in early Japanese photography, and this volume includes many of my own findings and research that I hope will add to the current store of information on the subject.
In particular, I believe this book should lessen the problem of attribution. Until now, correctly attributing images to photographers has been difficult, and mistakes have been commonplace. For the first time, however, Appendix 1 identifies hundreds of early photographers' works, data that should prove particularly useful to students of early Japanese photography. But more than anything else I hope that the photographs themselves will be of interest to others who, like me, are fascinated by the contradictions of the land and people of Japan.
—Reflections of the Rising Sun —
Japan in the Bakumatsu and Meiji Eras
by Sebastian Dobson
This book offers a unique visual record of possibly the most eventful half century in Japanese history: five decades during which Japan progressed from a backward, feudal society into a modern, industrial nation that, almost a decade before the First World War, defeated a major European power. By the end of this period, the speed of Japan's modernization appeared nothing short of miraculous. In 1905 the Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain confessed in Things Japanese to feeling "well-nigh four hundred years old" after living in Japan for little over thirty years:
To have lived through the transition stage of modern Japan makes a man feel preternaturally old; for here he is in modern times, with the air full of talk about bicycles and bacilli and "spheres of influence," and yet he can himself distinctly remember the Middle Ages.
If few contemporaries felt the weight of time as much as Chamberlain, most certainly sympathized. Today, when change is very much taken for granted, it is less easy to accept Chamberlain's complaint. However, we are fortunate that in addition to the vast amount of literature published on Japan at that time (when, as Chamberlain quipped, "not to have written a book on Japan is fast becoming a title to distinction"), we also have access to this period through the medium of photography. Many of the photographs contained in this book are historical records in their own right. These include the posthumous portraits of two European victims of samurai (page 123), which bear striking witness to the violence that accompanied the opening of Japan to the West, and the photographic likeness of Emperor Meiji (page 132), which clearly shows the modernizing course Japan took during his reign. Together the photographs offer a vivid illustration of Japan during the twilight years of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1867), known to Japanese historians as the Bakumatsu era, and the subsequent Meiji era (1868-1912). The following introduction is intended to provide a brief historical background to the kaleidoscope of images contained in this book.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan had been ruled by the Tokugawa family for 250 years. The emperor was a shadowy figure at best, who reigned, but did not rule, from the isolation of his court in Kyoto. Since the twelfth century the business of governing the country had been entrusted by the emperor to his shogun, or so-called supreme commander, whose military function provided the martial-sounding appellation bakufu, or "tent government," by which the shogun's administration was known for the remainder of its existence. After intermittent civil war, the coveted position of shogun finally passed to Tokugawa Ieyasu and his descendants in 1603. In time, however, the Tokugawa shogunate lost much of its vigor, and the shogun himself became as much a tool of his councilors as the emperor in Kyoto.
The Tokugawa shoguns, ostensibly ruling in the emperor's name from their base in Edo (Tokyo), maintained their power by carefully manipulating both their own vassals and the local feudal lords known as daimyo. The place of the latter in the political geography of Japan depended to a great extent on which side they or their ancestors had fought during the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Those who had had the foresight to support the Tokugawas were rewarded with domains close to the center of government and even with the prospect of marrying into the shogun's family; those, on the other hand, who had been damned by their earlier opposition were granted "outer lord" status, which brought with it relegation to domains on the northern and western peripheries of Japan. This group, indirectly benefiting from the distance to Edo, would later form the basis of opposition to the shogunate.
Regardless of their loyalty, however, all lords were required to attend the shogun's court in Edo once a year and, when not resident in the capital, to leave their families behind as security. This "alternate attendance" system proved a useful tool for controlling the daimyo. Not only did it provide the shogunate
