770
JAPAN
Nagasaki in 1848. Various new words were minted by
Japanese scholars and lexicographers to describe the
new technology, ranging from the direct transliterations
into Japanese syllabic script such as dageriyoteipu to
more elegant coinages employing Chinese characters,
such as ineikyô (‘Shadow-printing Mirror’). By the
mid-1860s, however, the classical expression shashin
(literally ‘Copying Truth’), which had hitherto been
used to describe a genre of Chinese-infl uenced painting,
gained the widest currency, and to this day remains the
Japanese word for photograph and photography.
The fi rst Japanese photographers operated for the
most part in a theoretical vacuum, and although many
were able to acquire the necessary equipment and sup-
plies, all of them had to struggle to apply the hard-won
book knowledge they acquired through translations of
Dutch textbooks to compensate for their lack of practi-
cal experience. Early researches into photography also
required the support of those feudal lords who had a
profound interest in Western Learning. Ueno’s camera
was acquired in 1848 by Shimazu Nariakira, lord of the
powerful Satsuma domain, who duly commanded two of
his clan scholars, Kawamoto Kômin and Matsuki Kôan,
to experiment with the apparatus. Although Kawamoto
studied enough Western writings on the daguerreotype
process to publish the first Japanese photographic
manual in 1854, success evaded the Satsuma scholars
for many years, and it was only in 1857 that two other
retainers of the clan, Ichiki Shirô and Ujuku Hikoemon,
succeeded in taking a daguerreotype likeness of their
lord, thus achieving the joint distinction of being the
fi rst Japanese to take a photograph. Other domains also
conducted research into photography, such as Mito,
Fukuoka and Kaga. Even after the arrival of foreign
photographers in Japan after 1859, daimyo patronage
was of great help to many Japanese photographers, the
most famous being Ueno Hikoma, son of Toshinojô,
who after learning the wet-collodion from a Western
photographer visiting Nagasaki, persuaded the daimyo
of the Tsu domain to sponsor his further photographic
studies in Edo during 1860–61. In 1862 Ueno published
the fi rst guide in Japanese to the wet-collodion process
and returned to Nagasaki to open the fi rst commercial
studio in the port.
It was through the agency of a Western photographer,
however, that the fi rst known photographs were taken
in Japan. In 1854, Eliphalet Brown Jnr., a daguerriean
from New York, arrived in Japan as part of Commodore
Perry’s mission to open up the country to foreign trade,
and his contribution to the visual record of the mission
was later incorporated in lithographic form into the of-
fi cial account published by order of the United States
Congress. Less fortunate was Lieutenant Aleksandr
Feodorovich Mozhaiskii, who also took daguerreotypes
during a parallel Russian expedition to Japan, but whose
work was lost before he even left Japan when his ship
was destroyed in a tidal wave in 1855. Brown and
Mozhaiskii were the fi rst of a wave of foreign photog-
raphers who came to Japan over the following decade.
Most were amateur photographers who were usually
more preoccupied with the business which had brought
them to Japan, whether as members of early diplomatic
missions, offi cers serving on the naval vessels which
provided them with transport and protection, merchants,
or missionaries. Those who came to Japan before 1860
with the specifi c object of photographing the country
and its people were in a minority, such as the American
artist Edward Meyer Kern, who visited Japan as part of
a hydrographic survey of the North Pacifi c undertaken
by the United States Navy between 1853 and 1856,
and the Swiss photographer Pierre Joseph Rossier, who
visited Japan on at least two occasions in 1859 and 1860
to take photographs for the London photographic fi rm
Negretti and Zambra.
The fi rst professional photographer who actually took
up residence in Japan was the American Orrin Eratus
Freeman (1830–1866), who appears to have arrived in
Yokohama early in 1860, followed by William Saunders
in 1862 and Charles Parker and Felice Beato in 1863.
Freeman, who had previously operated an ambrotype
studio in Shangahi, taught photography to one Ukai
Gyokusen, who later bought his teacher’s camera and
photographic equipment and went on to establish his own
studio in Edo in 1861, thus becoming the fi rst Japanese
commercial photographer. Several Japanese photog-
raphers served an apprenticeship of sorts with foreign
photographers. The most famous was perhaps Kusakabe
Kimbei, who worked as an assistant to Felice Beato and
possibly Baron von Stillfried as well. By 1881, Kusakabe
was operating his own studio in Yokohama and quickly
emerged as a major producer of photographs of land-
scapes and costume studies for the souvenir trade. This
route was not always easy. Stillfried, who also taught
Usui Shûsaburô and Futami Asakura, soon realized that
he was training up future business rivals and sought to
limit the extent of his instruction accordingly.
Others preferred to study abroad in order to master
techniques not yet current in Japan. Okamoto Keizô,
who later succeeded to the name of Suzuki Shinichi II,
went to San Francisco in 1879 to study photographic re-
touching at the studio of Isaac West Taber, and after his
return to Japan in 1880 enjoyed considerable success as
the fi rst practitioner of the technique. Ogawa Kazumasa
spent the years 1882–83 in Boston intensively studying
dry-plate photography, carbon printing and collotype
printing, and by 1890 had established himself as the
foremost photographic publisher in Japan.
Technologically, most of the nineteenth century was
taken up with catching up with photographic develop-
ments in the West, and the fi ve decades between the