10 volumes. Illustrated with 60 large format hand-colored albumen prints mounted in mattes; 200 small format hand-colored portrait and genre albumen prints mounted on text pages; 10 hand-colored collotypes of flowers by Ogawa Kazumasa, each mounted in a window mat; and 10 xylographic (woodblock print) reproductions of historically important Japanese paintings, mounted in window mats.. (Folio) 40x31 cm (15¾x12¼"), original crepe-paper over boards, French-fold and string-bound. No. 168 of 750 sets of the Edition de Luxe.
Contains classic late nineteenth century hand-colored albumen photographs of various Japanese views, including tea ceremonies, bridges, gardens, cherry blossoms, flower and produce vendors, temples, The Bronze Buddha at Kamakura, Mt. Fuji, theatre scenes, city and rural life, rickshaws, fishermaidens, women in traditional dress, etc. The Edition de Luxe, contains nearly five times the number of photographs and additional images as the far more common and much inferior “Yado” edition (of which 1,000 copies were published). Institutional bookplates from Franklin Trask Library with rubberstamps to edges and embossed stamps on title pages.
Although none of the albumen photographs are credited with the name of a photographer or studio – except for the collotype still lives of flowers by Ogawa Kazumasa – it is known from newspaper reports and other sources that Tamamura Kozaburo was commissioned by the J. B. Millet Company to supply these. Regarded as an originator of "Yokohama shashin" or Yokohama-style photography, Kozaburo became one of the most successful and popular commercial photographers in Japan.
Overwhelmed by the size of the order, Kozaburo reportedly employed more than 350 assistants to help with the printing and coloring. He also called on other Yokohama photographers to supply images in addition to his, including Ogawa Kazumasa, Kusakabe Kimbei, and T. Enami (Enami Nobukuni). Through extensive research, photograph historian Rob Oechsle has identified almost 50 photographs by Enami used in the Japan volumes. To date, this constitutes the largest number of images positively attributed to any one contributing photographer.
As stated on the title page, Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese was “Written by eminent Japanese authorities and scholars” and edited by Captain Francis Brinkley. It also includes an essay on Japanese art by Okakura Kakuzo, a student of Ernest Fenollosa and the first curator of Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The Japan volumes offer a detailed description of the history and culture of Japan. They cover a wide range of topics, including marital and family relations, women in Japan, art and literature, religion, customs and traditions, crime, commerce, and politics. Typical of Meiji era Japanese tourist photography, the hand-colored photographs show city views, architecture, historic sites, landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits of Japanese people.
The extraordinary number of original photographs used in the total number of sets of the various editions make this one of the most ambitious and remarkable achievements ever in the history of 19th-century photographic publishing. As Denise Bethel, director of the Photographs Department at Sotheby’s in New York, observed, “[It] may be the last great book to be illustrated with original photographs.”
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