Drawing from an extensive private collection assembled over many years, this book presents a unique selection of nineteenth-century photographs of Japan, many of which are published here for the first time.
Between the twilight years of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867) and the end of the Meiji Era (1868–1912) that followed it, photography offered a unique insight into the rapid transformation of Japan from an isolated, feudal society to a modern, industrialised state. In the four decades that followed the opening of the country in 1853, the camera evolved from an imported novelty to a familiar witness of Japanese daily life.
Operating from the Treaty Ports of Yokohama and elsewhere, early practitioners of photography plied an often precarious trade in images of Japan and laid the foundations of what would soon become a highly competitive industry with a global reach. Whether cherished as souvenirs of an exotic land of fond imagination or curated as visual documents of a fast-changing society, these images by foreign and Japanese photographers, often packaged in exquisitely produced albums, enjoyed a wide circulation abroad and played an important role in influencing perceptions of Japan in the West well into the early twentieth century.
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Using interdisciplinary research and critical analysis, this book examines experiences through (or with) kimonos in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Bringing new perspectives to challenge the existing model of ‘Japonisme in fashion’ and introducing overlooked contacts between kimonos and people, this book explores not only fine arts and department stores but also a variety of theatres and cheap postcards. Putting a particular focus on the responses and reactions elicited by kimonos in visual, textual and material forms, this book initiates an entirely new discussion on the British adoption of Japanese kimonos beyond the monolithic view of the relationship between the East and West.
Arisa Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor at University of Tsukuba, Japan.
The 1894 Hong Kong plague, part of the third plague pandemic, was a major outbreak of the bubonic plague in Hong Kong. 80,000 died in Guangzhou! To fight the plague soldiers and saailors were mobilised as well as inspection and disinfection teams, known as the “Whitewash Brigades”, and the establishment of temporary hospitals. despiute these efforts over 20,000 died.
So it seems that those involved with fighting the plague were awarded medals by ‘the Hong Kong Community’. It’s quite a dramatic medal in terms of the front. This shows the efforts obviously but also perhaps foreigners helping a Chinese. The Chinese in Hong Kong suffered dispopropotionately – Kennedy Town and Taipingshan particularly – and there was some distrust of western medicine and British soldiers so perhaps the medal’s image is meant to address this? There’s a lot more on all that here.
The Staffordshire Regiment clearing plague districts, 1894
Phyllis Konya (nee Juby) was an arts journalist, reviewer and theatre historian who married Sandor (AS) Konya in Cape Town in 1928. The pair moved to China and Phyllis began working for The China Mail as a journalist, and publishing some books (illustrated by her husband) based on the couple’s travels in China, including Chinese Fairy Tales (Newspaper Enterprise, 1934) and some of the chapbooks bound by string below published in the mid-1930s by The Newspaper Enterprise Ltd., Hong Kong.
