[HN Gopher] Photographs of 19th Century Japan
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Photographs of 19th Century Japan
Author : merothwell
Score : 99 points
Date : 2025-04-09 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cosmographia.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cosmographia.substack.com)
| kappasan wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiya
| xandrius wrote:
| A friend of mine also recently redid a machiya in Kyoto. It
| even had the godness mask near the ceiling, amazing.
|
| 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!
| kappasan wrote:
| Thanks so much for checking out the website! I hear machiya
| are quickly disappearing in Kyoto (often turned into generic
| apartments) so it's great to hear your friend is keeping the
| old city alive.
| helaoban wrote:
| What did we do to our world.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| The photo titled "Thief, outside of mosquito-net." really piqued
| my interest.
| colordrops wrote:
| Thief with a katana...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| What is the story of the 'letter carrier'?
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| He carried letters.
| xandrius wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| Keiko Fukuda, a judo trainer (10th degree black belt) in SF who
| died in 2013 aged 99 (she taught in her dojo in Noe Valley even
| into the last year of her life) was the student of the judo
| founder Kano Jigoro who opened his first judo school in 1882.
| bhaney wrote:
| Nikko Road seems like it would have flooding issues. I wonder how
| they avoided that.
| mongol wrote:
| 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.
| tkgally wrote:
| That's a nice collection of photographs.
|
| Here are some written accounts of Japan during that period:
|
| https://www.gally.net/jatsi/index.html
| userbinator wrote:
| 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...
| nearting wrote:
| And it's also mentioned in the third paragraph:
|
| > They were originally shot in black and white, then hand-
| coloured by artists -- a technique common at the time.
| srik wrote:
| They're lovely, thank you!
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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!
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(page generated 2025-04-09 23:00 UTC)