* 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.
Osaka Castle is a reconstruction. It's an empty shell, almost like a movie decor at this stage. If you want to see a real castle, there's the Himeji castle not too far from there.
You are absolutely right. The inside of Osaka castle is now concrete or something. But the outside and castle grounds still look like the article picture.
Himeji castle is a great recommendation.
> Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.
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.
Speaking of "crummy," R. Crumb talked about an afternoon he spent driving around the suburbs in the 1980s taking pictures of houses, streets, and strip malls so he could draw realistic backgrounds for his comics.
> “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.”
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.
Unfortunately those pretty houses come at a cost. Traditional materials and techniques usually come at a price. Lots of wood and joinery work needs to be done, much of it by hand. They are also not well insulated so hard to keep warm in winter. They're so pretty though!.
You can still see a few of these houses and their traditional gardens in some of the wealthy, old-money smelling parts of Kyoto.
My next door neighbour lives in one of those thatched roof houses. I once visited in mid May, it was sweltering hot outside so I was in Tshirts and shorts. Inside, it was freezing! They had the kotatsu and a kerosene stove on.
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.
Some video games try and do the former; I play too much FFXIV and a recurring theme there is that you go to a new area and you get the tourist's experience, tour the area, view the sights, meet the locals, figure out the local history and culture, etc.
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
Yeah, I saw that concept but I always feel like I'm supposed to be 6 years old to enjoy the interactions and the dialogue (both in FFXIV and FFXV). Also the "tourist moment" felt too much the canned tourist experience where everything is perfect, clean and everyone nice.
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!
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.
Kyoto was never bombed, but outside a very few carefully curated touristy bits, it's still an ugly AF concrete jungle that looks nothing like these pictures.
Not the central part of Kyoto. You can walk in areas like Gion that have mostly remained the same for centuries. Of course as cities get bigger you get concrete. just like other cities Kyoto has grown in the 20th century and at some point you need concrete instead of wood
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s how I feel about present day humanity with regards to computer tech. I was born around the time of the 8086; my parents never really became fluent with computers. I was a nerd and got into computers as a teen, soon enough I had internet and then WiFi and now frickin smartphones hooked into LLMs. We’re the Information Age equivalent of those folks who spanned all the from the feudal era to riding Honda motorbikes.
I'm possibly a similar vintage and enjoy telling my kids about changes that have happened within my lifetime, and not just things I've read of. TVs without remotes, to corded remotes, to normal remotes, all-in-one things, remotes with touch pads, everyone watching shows on personal devices with touchscreens, etc. Or from rotary phones to corded to cordless to early mobile phones, to what they're familiar with now. Record players, rewinding cassette tapes with a pencil, recording songs from radio, carrying around CDs with your Discman, minidiscs, MP3s, streaming. Such an interesting and wide series of changes.
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
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
There was nothing to do back then. And if there was, it was crazy and/or reserved for the feudal lords. The primary income of the state was through alcohol taxes. Countries thought it was okay to invade other countries just to make themselves bigger/stronger countries. Nationalism, racism, sexism were the norm. Most people can't read/write. Information is scant and passed on by word of mouth.
Thanks for the insight, but how it is different from today?
- 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.
(Re-reading what I wrote above, I'd like to clarify that all the stuff I wrote above (except perhaps the alcohol tax one?) is of course not specific to Japan.)
In ~150 years someone will pick some photos taken today and post them and someone will probably wonder the same thing. Go out and do some sightseeing - a lot of the sights in these photos still exist, but also, you look at these photos with different eyes than the people that grew up there do; changing how you look at your own environment or places of interest will probably also help.
These photos are, ah, not representative (most historical artefacts of this type aren’t; part of why people tend to have an impression of Victorian London as basically hell on earth is that, unusually, photos _were_ taken of the nasty bits, but really it was no worse than anywhere else at the time).
You’d certainly prefer to live in Japan in 2025 than in 1860.
Interesting, my reaction to these photos was "no thank you". It's fun to have a glimpse at the past, but I have no desire to live back then.
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.
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
Patchwork robes and non-orange clothes are common in Japanese Buddhism. The styles and colors vary significantly depending on the sect and one’s rank.[1]
As stated in TFA, the pictures were originally black and white and were colourised at the time. I cant find a record of who colourised them or when, but it sems to me like they were colourised shortly after by the original photographer, and as such the colours would be reasonably accurate. You can see lightness and texture changes that would imply to me that there were changes in the material at the time of the picture being taken, even if it was colourised incorrectly
There are several other colorized versions of that same photo online, all with very different color choices, so I wouldn't be too sure about the accuracy of TFA's version:
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.
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.
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.
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's a staged photograph by Kimbei Kusakabe (or Baron Raimund von Stillfried, they sold each other's works a lot and Kusakabe worked for Stillfried at one point) of hikyaku (express couriers) created to sate Western desire for souvenirs of "real" Japan.
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.
Thanks. Are the tattoos, the scanty clothing and the somewhat (to my eyes) effeminate appearance anything to do with being a courier? Or just something to titillate postcard buyers?
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?
>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 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.
Japan still is pretty isolationist or culturally conservative; I have no firsthand experience so this is all hearsay, but I gather the people living there are under a lot of societal / cultural pressure in how to behave, speak, live, etc. Foreigners get some leeway because they're foreign, but that's probably not so different wherever you go.
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.
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.
film photography had a lot more detail until we moved to cheap 35mm film for cost and convenience reasons. Even middle format has a huge effective resolution,
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
> This reminds me that we are all losing our unique and diverse cultures and humanity through the incessant drive of globalist world domination to force everyone to do and be the same
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.
Your comments reminds me one time I discussed with a university professor about how evil the eradication of the biosphere diversity was (wildlife but also unique breeds with century-long histories), and he replied that we'd have a "less bloated, more efficient biosphere".
I agree diversity makes us richer, and historically there was always cultural diffusion, what I lament though is that this is now partially done by multinational corporations, wiping out local traditions.
> this is now partially done by multinational corporations, wiping out local traditions.
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!
Agreed and besides Europe the Catholic Church destroyed much of the history of Mesoamerica. But, part of "culture" is our history as well, it just saddens me though thinking what we are going to leave behind for future generations.
Cultures evolve, borrow, remix - that's always been true, even long before globalization. People still find ways to hold onto local traditions, stories, food, language - sometimes because the outside world feels so loud.
It happened at a tiny fraction of the speed it happens at now tbh. I'd say now it far surpasses the rate at which they differentiate to varying extent.
You’re really underplaying how awful the life was for an average person in before-times. Sure, pretty buildings, different cultures, and etc. were more prominent. But also an average person would never be able to enjoy those in their lifetimes.
Not unlike how it went in a lot of places at the time; the problem with history is that they mainly focus on and make records of the upper echelons, the pretty parts. Few historians / writers / etc make notes of the common people. Some exceptions, of course, but you'd be forgiven for thinking Europe was mainly castles, knights and political intrigue back in the middle ages.
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.
Whether it's good or bad I feel like what you mention is partially besides the point no?
As in prosperity might look different without the things influencing this cultural mixture but surely the argument would not be that we'd be living in the 1800's
I'm not buying this. All these claims rely on some nebulous "poor people" who were kept hidden away somewhere. There is no good reason to doubt that these photos show regular people, and the buildings they lived in.
Mm. When I go on holiday, I take notice of mundane things in the new place that are different to mundane things in my normal life. Street furniture, pylons, graffiti, the contents of supermarket shelves, dusty unpaved roads[0].
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?
[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".
Both of my grandpas (who have passed away long ago), would beg to differ. People, especially when taking photos wasn't basically free, don't take photos of ordinary things. If you see 1 rose among 500 tulips, that will catch your eye. And vice versa.
Poor people were not hidden away, it's just their lives weren't that beautiful to be shown and paraded around.
Most of the people in the photos seem be ordinary, working class people. Even buddhist monks, who swore to live in poverty, celibacy and to avoid food that was too flavorful.
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.
The thing is, Sakoku passim, you can't really prevent homogenization without entirely abandoning the 20th century (heck, 19th century!) travel revolution. You'd need a global ban on air travel, TV, and Internet.
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.
This is kind of an ironic comment as Japan was very isolationist - that is, resisting foreign influence, sticking to their own culture / traditions / etc - at least up until the time period of this photo, which is when the Meiji Restoration started and they opened up more to foreigners.
Corporations are probably low down the list of drivers of cultural homogenization. Merely exporting (via social media, entertainment, cosmopolitan norms, etc) the Western conception of diversity as virtue, as well as the particular definition(s) du jour of diversity, is no less a form of cultural homogenization (or "colonization" using the parlance of some circles).
My dad was stationed in Japan after the war, and he enjoyed the Japanese culture. He brought home bits of it. I thought "zori" was an English word for many years. I still prefer it over flip-flops.
He'd import culture from other places he was stationed. He adopted the German custom of an after-lunch nap, which I still do.
Hmm. If we want to preserve our diverse cultures, then we have to do more to defend our own cultures against immigrants imposing their cultures over them.
How you do that without being outright racist is the tough part.
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).
You can start by discussing things and not quibbling over terms.
> 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.
You're going to have to be more specific and maybe give some examples. I don't see a path from cheaper produce at some ethnic stores (the only part of your comment connected to reality) to total cultural replacement.
Don't see much imposition in Japan and this year will mark ten years living here. People who can't or won't assimilate quickly find themselves living on another plane of existence and eventually leave. Language plays a big part with that too. If you can't speak Japanese or have someone with you who can there are countless everyday situations where you're SOL.
How do immigrants impose their cultures on a host country? Can you give some examples? Historically populations mix by migration, wars, slavery, and trading networks. It is a process that cannot be stopped, maybe slowed down or accelerated. The disappointing aspect of it, is now this process has been hijacked by corporations. How did the West acquire a culture of coffee or coffee-shops? Now is McDonalds and Costa Cafes.
Along a similar tangent - we are losing a lot of authenticity with the loss of culture. When the younger ones complain that 'nothing is real', this is a portion of what they mean.
A big aspect of authenticity is uniqueness and modern culture and political thought are absolutely counter-aligned to this idea.
I just don't think that's true. This seems like a really pessimistic take. Is it truly "globalist world domination" — implying that our corporate overlords want us to live like this? Or is it purely function and aesthetic? Capitalism puts power in the hands of consumers—sure, marketing has an influence—but also, we as consumers are the ultimate deciders. Cost, labor, and wealth. All are influences in the deciding of what we choose to buy. If what we have today is lifeless, I think it's of our own collective choosing.
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).
You can't be serious, right? As a consumer, where can I choose to buy a printer with no planned obsolescence? Or a food item with no plastic packaging? In capitalism we do not, in fact, have the power you describe, because only the most profitable products are sold at scale, not the most desirable.
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.
Osaka Castle is a reconstruction. It's an empty shell, almost like a movie decor at this stage. If you want to see a real castle, there's the Himeji castle not too far from there.
You are absolutely right. The inside of Osaka castle is now concrete or something. But the outside and castle grounds still look like the article picture. Himeji castle is a great recommendation.
> Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.
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.
Speaking of "crummy," R. Crumb talked about an afternoon he spent driving around the suburbs in the 1980s taking pictures of houses, streets, and strip malls so he could draw realistic backgrounds for his comics.
> “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.
Unfortunately those pretty houses come at a cost. Traditional materials and techniques usually come at a price. Lots of wood and joinery work needs to be done, much of it by hand. They are also not well insulated so hard to keep warm in winter. They're so pretty though!.
You can still see a few of these houses and their traditional gardens in some of the wealthy, old-money smelling parts of Kyoto.
My next door neighbour lives in one of those thatched roof houses. I once visited in mid May, it was sweltering hot outside so I was in Tshirts and shorts. Inside, it was freezing! They had the kotatsu and a kerosene stove on.
That's a feature these days!
You can certainly combine modern construction techniques with traditional looks. Don't expect 1:1 looks but you can make them less boring.
Yeah, Nikko still looks pretty much the same, just with a lot more people.
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)
It doesn't work. The photos don't load.
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.
Can you share the name & author of the book?
I'll plug Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands as an extraordinary deep dive into a world that's entirely disappeared in our lifetimes:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/825419.Arabian_Sands
https://www.japanbiking.com/tours-2/previous-tours/thomas-st...
Both books (not just Japan, he cycled around the world): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1710
Some video games try and do the former; I play too much FFXIV and a recurring theme there is that you go to a new area and you get the tourist's experience, tour the area, view the sights, meet the locals, figure out the local history and culture, etc.
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
Yeah, I saw that concept but I always feel like I'm supposed to be 6 years old to enjoy the interactions and the dialogue (both in FFXIV and FFXV). Also the "tourist moment" felt too much the canned tourist experience where everything is perfect, clean and everyone nice.
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!
Is it "Around the world on a bicycle"? I, too, would like to know the name of this book. Sounds interesting!
Thomas Stevens, really an interesting character. He sometimes makes sweeping generalisations, which makes his writing even more real and not filtered.
One suspects "Bloody hell, car drivers are selfish bastards" sprung from his lips a couple of times.
> this book of a guy who cycled across Central Asia and in Japan
Go on, give us a clue. Title, author, even language...?
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.
Nikko really does feel like stepping back in time if you catch it early enough
> 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.
Kyoto was never bombed, but outside a very few carefully curated touristy bits, it's still an ugly AF concrete jungle that looks nothing like these pictures.
Not the central part of Kyoto. You can walk in areas like Gion that have mostly remained the same for centuries. Of course as cities get bigger you get concrete. just like other cities Kyoto has grown in the 20th century and at some point you need concrete instead of wood
Gion and Sannenzaka are the very definition of touristy Kyoto.
They are touristy because they are authentic in the first place.
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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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you to share. I didn't know about her. There is a detailed Wiki page about her life here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiko_Fukuda
That’s how I feel about present day humanity with regards to computer tech. I was born around the time of the 8086; my parents never really became fluent with computers. I was a nerd and got into computers as a teen, soon enough I had internet and then WiFi and now frickin smartphones hooked into LLMs. We’re the Information Age equivalent of those folks who spanned all the from the feudal era to riding Honda motorbikes.
I'm possibly a similar vintage and enjoy telling my kids about changes that have happened within my lifetime, and not just things I've read of. TVs without remotes, to corded remotes, to normal remotes, all-in-one things, remotes with touch pads, everyone watching shows on personal devices with touchscreens, etc. Or from rotary phones to corded to cordless to early mobile phones, to what they're familiar with now. Record players, rewinding cassette tapes with a pencil, recording songs from radio, carrying around CDs with your Discman, minidiscs, MP3s, streaming. Such an interesting and wide series of changes.
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
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.
They were dyed, rather than painted. The details come from the photograph.
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.
There was nothing to do back then. And if there was, it was crazy and/or reserved for the feudal lords. The primary income of the state was through alcohol taxes. Countries thought it was okay to invade other countries just to make themselves bigger/stronger countries. Nationalism, racism, sexism were the norm. Most people can't read/write. Information is scant and passed on by word of mouth.
Thanks for the insight, but how it is different from today?
- 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.
(Re-reading what I wrote above, I'd like to clarify that all the stuff I wrote above (except perhaps the alcohol tax one?) is of course not specific to Japan.)
In some ways we made it better and in some ways we made it worse.
In ~150 years someone will pick some photos taken today and post them and someone will probably wonder the same thing. Go out and do some sightseeing - a lot of the sights in these photos still exist, but also, you look at these photos with different eyes than the people that grew up there do; changing how you look at your own environment or places of interest will probably also help.
These photos are, ah, not representative (most historical artefacts of this type aren’t; part of why people tend to have an impression of Victorian London as basically hell on earth is that, unusually, photos _were_ taken of the nasty bits, but really it was no worse than anywhere else at the time).
You’d certainly prefer to live in Japan in 2025 than in 1860.
Interesting, my reaction to these photos was "no thank you". It's fun to have a glimpse at the past, but I have no desire to live back then.
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.
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The photo titled "Thief, outside of mosquito-net." really piqued my interest.
Thief with a katana...
It could be worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsujigiri
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NDL-DC_1301844_Toyoh...
That's messed up.
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
Patchwork robes and non-orange clothes are common in Japanese Buddhism. The styles and colors vary significantly depending on the sect and one’s rank.[1]
[1] https://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/dglib/contents/learn/edc28/shiru/...
These photos look colorized. Likely not the original colors of those robes.
As stated in TFA, the pictures were originally black and white and were colourised at the time. I cant find a record of who colourised them or when, but it sems to me like they were colourised shortly after by the original photographer, and as such the colours would be reasonably accurate. You can see lightness and texture changes that would imply to me that there were changes in the material at the time of the picture being taken, even if it was colourised incorrectly
There are several other colorized versions of that same photo online, all with very different color choices, so I wouldn't be too sure about the accuracy of TFA's version:
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://sova.si.edu/record/fsa.a1999.35/ref484
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:
https://www.gally.net/jatsi/index.html
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.
I don’t think that was generally the case. Your comment reminds me of this 1937 footage I saw recently: https://youtu.be/o4xkucZ40Fw?t=1m50s
It would be great if there were photos of today for some of these old photos, especially for structures/places/scenery that still exists.
What is the story of the 'letter carrier'?
It's a staged photograph by Kimbei Kusakabe (or Baron Raimund von Stillfried, they sold each other's works a lot and Kusakabe worked for Stillfried at one point) of hikyaku (express couriers) created to sate Western desire for souvenirs of "real" Japan.
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.
Thanks. Are the tattoos, the scanty clothing and the somewhat (to my eyes) effeminate appearance anything to do with being a courier? Or just something to titillate postcard buyers?
I was curious about this too and did some searching. Found this source
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.
Interesting.
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?
Fascinating
He carried letters.
>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.
> 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.
Japan still is pretty isolationist or culturally conservative; I have no firsthand experience so this is all hearsay, but I gather the people living there are under a lot of societal / cultural pressure in how to behave, speak, live, etc. Foreigners get some leeway because they're foreign, but that's probably not so different wherever you go.
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...
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.
I can't tell from that, was the photographer generally the painter? Or was the painter at least present when the photograph was taken?
Based on the accurate coloration of the Yomei-mon gate at Nikko, the painter must have been familiar enough with the photo subjects.
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.
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.
We are not different. The world is. I guarantee you those people had the exact same hopes and dreams we have now.
> 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.
Striking how clean and organized everything looks in the photos. It's really ingrained in the Japanese psyche.
Lovely pictures, especially liked the one of the room with the carpet, tea set, and table at the window. Everything low on the floor.
Lots and lots of Japanese homes and apartments are like this, today. "Floor life," I like to call it.
Wow! Spectacular images!
Seeing the captured images, instead of drawings or verbal description, is such a window back in time.
Nikkō Road seems like it would have flooding issues. I wonder how they avoided that.
Beautiful. That must have been a lot of work hand-coloring those photos.
What amazes me is the quality of these pictures. Are they digitally restored?
film photography had a lot more detail until we moved to cheap 35mm film for cost and convenience reasons. Even middle format has a huge effective resolution,
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
It's like painting made by human, not photo captured by camera.
There's something about seeing real people from that far back
They’re lovely, thank you!
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> This reminds me that we are all losing our unique and diverse cultures and humanity through the incessant drive of globalist world domination to force everyone to do and be the same
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.
Your comments reminds me one time I discussed with a university professor about how evil the eradication of the biosphere diversity was (wildlife but also unique breeds with century-long histories), and he replied that we'd have a "less bloated, more efficient biosphere".
I agree diversity makes us richer, and historically there was always cultural diffusion, what I lament though is that this is now partially done by multinational corporations, wiping out local traditions.
> this is now partially done by multinational corporations, wiping out local traditions.
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!
Agreed and besides Europe the Catholic Church destroyed much of the history of Mesoamerica. But, part of "culture" is our history as well, it just saddens me though thinking what we are going to leave behind for future generations.
And even language itself changes how we think. We can blame the romans for making english the lingua franca.
Cultures evolve, borrow, remix - that's always been true, even long before globalization. People still find ways to hold onto local traditions, stories, food, language - sometimes because the outside world feels so loud.
It happened at a tiny fraction of the speed it happens at now tbh. I'd say now it far surpasses the rate at which they differentiate to varying extent.
You’re really underplaying how awful the life was for an average person in before-times. Sure, pretty buildings, different cultures, and etc. were more prominent. But also an average person would never be able to enjoy those in their lifetimes.
Not unlike how it went in a lot of places at the time; the problem with history is that they mainly focus on and make records of the upper echelons, the pretty parts. Few historians / writers / etc make notes of the common people. Some exceptions, of course, but you'd be forgiven for thinking Europe was mainly castles, knights and political intrigue back in the middle ages.
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.
Whether it's good or bad I feel like what you mention is partially besides the point no? As in prosperity might look different without the things influencing this cultural mixture but surely the argument would not be that we'd be living in the 1800's
I'm not buying this. All these claims rely on some nebulous "poor people" who were kept hidden away somewhere. There is no good reason to doubt that these photos show regular people, and the buildings they lived in.
Mm. When I go on holiday, I take notice of mundane things in the new place that are different to mundane things in my normal life. Street furniture, pylons, graffiti, the contents of supermarket shelves, dusty unpaved roads[0].
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".
My dad took quite a few pictures of everyday life in Japan after WW2, including everyday life on the military bases.
The same during the Korean War he was a pilot in.
Both of my grandpas (who have passed away long ago), would beg to differ. People, especially when taking photos wasn't basically free, don't take photos of ordinary things. If you see 1 rose among 500 tulips, that will catch your eye. And vice versa.
Poor people were not hidden away, it's just their lives weren't that beautiful to be shown and paraded around.
Most of the people in the photos seem be ordinary, working class people. Even buddhist monks, who swore to live in poverty, celibacy and to avoid food that was too flavorful.
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.
I have a couple books full of photos of the Civil War. There are a lot of ordinary soldier and camp life pictures in it.
Maybe, these being taken in the 19th century when photography was expensive, they were well off enough to afford paying for it?
The thing is, Sakoku passim, you can't really prevent homogenization without entirely abandoning the 20th century (heck, 19th century!) travel revolution. You'd need a global ban on air travel, TV, and Internet.
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.
Long distance traveling was invented much earlier than 20th and even 19th century.
Here's an isochrone — travel time — map from 1881, centred on London. Note the legend uses tens of days to measure time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Isochronic_Passage_Chart_...
Speed and scale of long-distance travel are obviously the relevant factors, not just "is it possible to go far".
Air travel is faster than horse, and carries more people.
This is kind of an ironic comment as Japan was very isolationist - that is, resisting foreign influence, sticking to their own culture / traditions / etc - at least up until the time period of this photo, which is when the Meiji Restoration started and they opened up more to foreigners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration
Corporations are probably low down the list of drivers of cultural homogenization. Merely exporting (via social media, entertainment, cosmopolitan norms, etc) the Western conception of diversity as virtue, as well as the particular definition(s) du jour of diversity, is no less a form of cultural homogenization (or "colonization" using the parlance of some circles).
My dad was stationed in Japan after the war, and he enjoyed the Japanese culture. He brought home bits of it. I thought "zori" was an English word for many years. I still prefer it over flip-flops.
He'd import culture from other places he was stationed. He adopted the German custom of an after-lunch nap, which I still do.
Hmm. If we want to preserve our diverse cultures, then we have to do more to defend our own cultures against immigrants imposing their cultures over them.
How you do that without being outright racist is the tough part.
And I say this as a migrated child of migrants.
> we have to do more to defend our own cultures
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).
You can start by discussing things and not quibbling over terms.
> 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.
You're going to have to be more specific and maybe give some examples. I don't see a path from cheaper produce at some ethnic stores (the only part of your comment connected to reality) to total cultural replacement.
Don't see much imposition in Japan and this year will mark ten years living here. People who can't or won't assimilate quickly find themselves living on another plane of existence and eventually leave. Language plays a big part with that too. If you can't speak Japanese or have someone with you who can there are countless everyday situations where you're SOL.
Yes.
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?!
How do immigrants impose their cultures on a host country? Can you give some examples? Historically populations mix by migration, wars, slavery, and trading networks. It is a process that cannot be stopped, maybe slowed down or accelerated. The disappointing aspect of it, is now this process has been hijacked by corporations. How did the West acquire a culture of coffee or coffee-shops? Now is McDonalds and Costa Cafes.
> How did the West acquire a culture of coffee or coffee-shops?
For that matter, how did those coffee shops displace tea rooms?
Along a similar tangent - we are losing a lot of authenticity with the loss of culture. When the younger ones complain that 'nothing is real', this is a portion of what they mean.
A big aspect of authenticity is uniqueness and modern culture and political thought are absolutely counter-aligned to this idea.
I just don't think that's true. This seems like a really pessimistic take. Is it truly "globalist world domination" — implying that our corporate overlords want us to live like this? Or is it purely function and aesthetic? Capitalism puts power in the hands of consumers—sure, marketing has an influence—but also, we as consumers are the ultimate deciders. Cost, labor, and wealth. All are influences in the deciding of what we choose to buy. If what we have today is lifeless, I think it's of our own collective choosing.
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).
You can't be serious, right? As a consumer, where can I choose to buy a printer with no planned obsolescence? Or a food item with no plastic packaging? In capitalism we do not, in fact, have the power you describe, because only the most profitable products are sold at scale, not the most desirable.
The mailman had a pretty wild costume