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Selling Portrait Photographs: EarlyPhotographic Business in Asakusa,

Japan

Maki Fukuoka

This article offers a case study of the process that shaped popular understanding ofphotographic practice, technology and images in early Meiji (1868–88) Japan.Specifically, I argue that the neighbourhood of Asakusa – a space already codifiedas one of transformation and performance, of ‘play and prayer’ – lent itself to thebusiness of photographic studios and provided a rich backdrop to the dynamicproduction and consumption of photographic objects that were unlike those foundelsewhere in the new capital of Tokyo.

Keywords: early photography in Japan, studio photography, life-sized photographic

portraits, photographic souvenirs, albumen prints, Kitaniwa Tsukuba (1842–87), Ezaki

Reiji (1855–1910), Shimooka Renjo (1823–1914)

The 4 October 1881 edition of the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri shinbun contains a

curious report of a banquet hosted by the prominent photographer Kitaniwa

Tsukuba in Asakusa, Tokyo.1 Asakusa is located about 4 km (1 ri, 2.5 miles) north

of the centre of the metropolis, the Imperial Palace, which served as the residence of

the Tokugawa shogunate until 1868, and then as the residence of the Meiji Emperor

from 1869. Situated on the west side of the Sumida River, the Asakusa area became

known as one of the major entertainment areas (sakariba) during the late Tokugawa

period. According to the article, Kitaniwa had recently acquired a studio there that

had once belonged to Uchida Kuichi, one of the pioneers of photography in Japan.

Reopening the studio as his own business, Kitaniwa had organised a banquet on 1

October to commemorate the occasion. At the banquet he displayed a number of

photographs of old men whose facial expressions varied from one portrait to the

next.2 It is unclear from the newspaper article whether these photographs were of

different men or of the same man. Kitaniwa had placed actual garments on the

photographs of the old men, which seem from the report to have been free-standing

life-sized portraits. We know that by 1878 the solar camera (also known as a solar

enlarger), which could enlarge a small-sized to medium-sized negative to mural size,

was already in use at Shashindo, a photographic studio in Asakusa.3 The article also

notes that the old men in the photographs were posed in the positions of the sixteen

Buddhist arhats (j�uroku rakan, historically respected Buddhist practitioners), and

that the presents Kitaniwa gave his guests included hand towels and hairpins that

bore images of actors taken by other photographers.

This description of Kitaniwa’s banquet underscores both the local specificities of

Asakusa and one of the distinguishing features of the early history of photography in

Japan – namely, its rapid dissemination into popular culture. Kitaniwa’s display of

Email for correspondence:

mfukuoka@ umich.edu

I thank Kevin Carr, Luke Gartlan, Tom

Gunning, Graham Smith and the graduate

students and faculty participants of the

Visual andMaterial Perspectives on East Asia

Workshop at the University of Chicago for

their insightful comments and productive

suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

All translations from the Japanese are mine.

The names of authors for publications in

Japanese appear following the Japanese order –

surname followed by given name. If the

publication is in English, the order is

reversed.

1 – Yomiuri shinbun (4 October 1881),

chokan, 2.

2 – Unfortunately, I have been unable to find

any visual records of Kitaniwa’s 1881

banquet. The original Japanese reads

‘shichimenso no rojin no shashin’.

3 – An advertisement by Shashindo in

Yomiuri shinbun (12March 1878), chokan, 4,

announced that ‘apprentices of Uchida

Kuichi and Mr. Hasegawa have produced

life-sized photographs by using a newly

imported device, including [portraits of]

actors and courtesans of Tokyo and other

famous people’.

History of Photography, Volume 35, Number 4, November 2011

Print ISSN 0308-7298; Online ISSN 2150-7295

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life-sized photographs of figures adorned with actual clothes echoed the visual logic

of the temporary exhibitions (misemono) that defined the popular culture of the

neighbourhood of Asakusa, particularly shows of ‘living dolls’ (ikiningyo),4 while his

posing the figures as arhats reflected the unity of ‘play and prayer’ that also defined

Asakusa during the previous Tokugawa period (1603–1867).5

Kitaniwa’s display does not quite fit comfortably with two common under-

standings of photography in early Meiji (1868–88)6 Japan, namely: that because

access to photography was limited to privileged territorial lords during the

Tokugawa period, from the end of the Tokugawa through the early Meiji, those

who had heard of the technology associated it with numerous superstitions; and that

the Meiji government easily and eagerly adapted photography on coming into power

in 1868 and effectively deployed the technology as a means of augmenting its project

of ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika). In terms of the first narrative, we

find, for instance, that in 1862 a Japanese teacher of the Dutch language believed he

had become ill because he had been photographed, exclaiming on his deathbed: ‘I

was cursed by photography!’7 Historians have noted several such superstitions that

circulated in the early Meiji about the photographic process: one’s life would be

shortened, one’s soul would be taken (by the camera?), and if one was photographed

in the centre of a three-person portrait, one would die soon. Kitaniwa’s 1881 display

of free-standing life-sized photographs of old men adorned and posed as Buddhist

arhats circumvented the fear of photographic representation that these superstitions

instilled, instead revealing photography to be already an integral part of visual

culture in Asakusa.

The second narrative, of photography as a constitutive element of Japan’s

modernisation, sees the proliferation of photographic studios as a visible social

change that explains – indeed, manifests – the rapidity and prevalence of Japan’s

westernisation.8 The Meiji government incorporated photographic technology into

several of their projects: photography played a pivotal role in documenting imperial

pageantry after Uchida Kuichi was commissioned by the Meiji government to be a

photographer to accompany the royal couple in May 1872; and Yokohama

Matsusaburo and Takahashi Yuichi contributed to the government report on the

status of old temples and their holdings in August 1872, known as Jinshin kensa,

using stereoscopic photographs and wet-collodion glass negatives. TheMeiji govern-

ment also began to photograph and collect portraits of captured criminals in 1872.9

These incorporations of photographic technology into Meiji governmental projects

are often cited to demonstrate how the early history of photography in Japan reflects

and embodies the broad changes instigated and promoted by the Meiji government.

Within this narrative, photographic technology represents but one of many ‘western’

practices that symbolise the popular political slogan ‘Civilization and Enlight-

enment’. Indeed, photography was included in 1872 as one of the ‘seven standard

paraphernalia of Civilization and Enlightenment’, along with newspapers, a postal

system, gaslights, steam engines, exhibitions, and dirigible balloons.10 A contempor-

ary historian of photography, Iizawa Kotaro, notes that themood of ‘Civilization and

Enlightenment’ was critical to changing the reception of photography.11 Yet,

Kitaniwa’s use of photography at the banquet lacks any discernable symbolisms

associated with the westernisation, or ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’. If so desired,

Kitaniwa would have dressed and posed the life-standing figures in western attire,

rather than Buddhist arhats.

This article offers a case study that sheds new light on the process that shaped

popular understandings of photographic practice, technology, and images in the first

twenty years of the Meiji period.12 More specifically, I argue that the neighbourhood

of Asakusa – a space already codified as one of transformation and performance –

lent itself to the business of photographic studios, and served as a fitting and rich

backdrop to the dynamic production and consumption of photographic objects that

were unlike those found in any other neighbourhood of the new capital of Tokyo. By

situating the production and consumption of portrait photography in an historic

4 – For a recent English-language article on

ikiningyo, see Kinoshita Naoyuki, ‘Kisaburo,

Kuniyoshi, and the ‘‘Living Doll’’ ’,

Impressions, 31 (2010), 101–13. For a

pioneering study on the topic, see Asakura

Musei, Misemono kenky�u, Tokyo: Chikuma

Shobo 2002. For further studies ofmisemono,

see Kawazoe Y�u, Edo no misemono, Tokyo:

Iwanami Shoten 2000; Aoki Koichiro,

Bakumatsu ishin edoshomin no tanoshimi,

Tokyo: Ch�ukosha 2000; and Kinoshita

Naoyuki, Bijutsu toiu misemono, Tokyo:

Heibonsha 1993.

5 – The Japanese pagoda erected near the

northwest corner of the Senso-ji temple in

the eighteenth century bears the

representations of the sixteen arhats on its

base. Kitaniwa’s gesture to these local

religious objects thus extends the carefully

constructed and cultivated atmosphere of

‘prayer and play’ that defined Asakusa,

which I discuss later in this article.

6 – Throughout this article, ‘early Meiji’

refers to the first twenty years of the Meiji

period (1868–1912).

7 – Ozawa Takeshi, Bakumatsu Meiji no

shashin, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo 2000, 96.

8 – See, for instance, Ann Tucker,

‘Introduction’, in The History of Japanese

Photography, ed. Anne Wilkes Tucker et al.,

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003,

2–13.

9 – Photographing the criminals was a

project proposed initially by Eto Shinpei, a

Meiji politician chiefly engaged with

structuring the legal system. Ironically, Eto

was the first person arrested by the

government via the distributed portraits

during the Saga Rebellion of 1874. See Ishii

Ayako and Iizawa Kotaro, ‘Nihon shashinshi

nenpyo’, in Nihon shashinshi gaisetsu, ed.

Iizawa Kotaro, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten

1999, 4.

10 – John W. Dower, ‘Introduction’, in A

Century of Japanese Photography, ed. Japan

Photographers Association, London:

Hutchinson 1971, 9.

11 – Iizawa, Nihon shashinshi gaisetsu, 13.

12 – For a political deployment of the

photographic portrait in early Meiji and the

relationship to earlier portrait practices, see

Mikiko Hirayama, ‘The Emperor’s New

Clothes: Japanese Visuality and Imperial

Portrait Photography’, History of

Photography 33:2 (2009), 165–84. For a

detailed study of a commercial photographic

studio in the countryside, see the dissertation

by Karen Fraser, ‘The Tomishige Studio and

The Development of Domestic Commercial

Photography in Meiji Japan’, Stanford

University 2006; and Karen Fraser, ‘Studio

Practices in Early Japanese Photography: The

Tomishige Archive’, History of Photography

33:2 (2009), 132–44.

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neighbourhood known for myriad forms of popular entertainments and perfor-

mances, the photographic studios that opened in Asakusa took advantage both of

established business protocols there and of the expectations of a public that visited

Asakusa with the particular desire to see fantastic visual metamorphoses. Asakusa

was a space fuelled by the expectations of what I call ‘dissonant seeing’, predicated on

transformations of the human body in different representational media. Dissonant

seeing does not rely upon nominal identification of what one sees and what one

knows; rather, it strives to play with the gap between the representation and the

original subject that the representation is made to resemble.

Contextualising the practice of photography in relation to the forms of visual

entertainments available in the neighbourhood, we come to see photographic pro-

ducts, particularly portraits, as the bearers of cultural practices that supported and

expanded both available business tactics and the popular desire for dissonant seeing

in Asakusa. This analysis, then, illuminates the extent to which the practice of studio

photography – and thus its historical significance – were embedded in the contem-

poraneous visual practices of Asakusa, which responded to the desire to play with

visual media by adapting to, being re-presented in and converging with various other

visual media. More broadly, by offering an account that differs from both the top-

down account (the governmental effort of ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’) and the

bottom-up account (the fearful reception of photography and reluctance to be

photographed), this article aims to link the popular desire for dissonant seeing

with the early photographic business in Asakusa, and to show that the combination

of the two was a powerful catalyst in the flourishing of the photographic business in

early Meiji Japan.

Situating Asakusa’s Photographic Business

Certainly, we can interpret a self-portrait of a photographer (figure 1) as evidence

that photographic studios owed their material support to the new trading policies

with European countries and worked in tandem with the material changes brought

about by the new Meiji government. This self-portrait suggests that the photogra-

pher presented himself as the embodiment of a cutting-edge westernised profes-

sional. Gazing comfortably and directly into the camera, he codifies his own body

with readily legible signs of westernisation: a bow tie, trousers (instead of kimono),

and a pair of leather shoes (instead of wooden sandals). His face sports additional

signs of his acceptance of western cultural practices – an English-style moustache and

pair of spectacles – as though to demonstrate the extent to which he has internalised

the process of westernisation. His slightly tilted head and left arm resting on his hip

echo postures seen in photographic portraits of his western counterparts. Holding

the lens cap in his right hand, his camera is turned to the left of the represented space,

implying that while being photographed himself he is also photographing a subject

located outside the frame, creating a mirroring composition between the representa-

tion and the represented. With the dominant placement and size of the camera

beside the photographer, and with the painted backdrop that envelopes the space, a

portrait such as this one begs us – both pictorially and historically – to align early

photographic practice in Japan with westernisation, in an obvious and unproble-

matic model of interpretation.13

At the same time, we find allusions to portrait photography as an undependable

representation in early Meiji Japan. In A Hundred Tales of Monstrous

Transformation,14 the popular writer Takabatake Ransen mocks the passive accep-

tance and practice of the governmental slogan ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ by

punning on the word ‘enlightenment’ (kaika) with a concocted Chinese two-

character compound, also pronounced kaika in Japanese, which means ‘transforma-

tion into monstrosity’. The first illustration in his book (figure 2) shows a westernised

man waving the newly designed Japanese national flag from behind a room divider, on

the other side of which diverse old monsters twist and turn, apparently trying to

13 – Although beyond the scope of this

article, this photographic image offers a

fascinating contrast to the thoughts of Sata

Kaiseki. Sata was a Buddhist monk who

wrote several influential books criticising the

Meiji government, especially its promotion

of westernisation. He wrote in 1881 Tentori

kots�uron (Evaluation of Foreign trades) that

‘most of general populous do not think

photography does any harm to the nation’.

Calculating the cost of and the heavy reliance

on foreign import of the necessary products

to make photographic prints, Sata

concludes: ‘indeed, photography does an

enormous harm [to the nation]’. See Sata

Kaiseki, Tentori kots�uron, reprinted in Ogi

Shinzo, Kumakura Isao and Ueno Chizuko

(eds), Nihon kindai shiso taikei, vol. 13

F�uzoku, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten 1990, 90–1.

14 – Takabatake Ransen, Kaika hyaku

monogatari, Tokyo: Izumiya Ichibe 1875.

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escape. The description of the scene, written on the top centre of the two-page

spread, follows the tradition of popular illustrated books of the time, and states

that the monsters were startled by the appearance of the flag and had begun to

run away from it.

The second illustration (figure 3), captioned ‘Transforming into monstrosity

through the newly invented copied picture’ (Shinhatsumei utsushie no henka) within

a rectangular cartouche, shows six separate images of carte-de-visite photographs.

Five of the six are portraits of the main characters in the short stories that follow:

a gentleman (tonosama), a courtesan (geisha), a young man (shosei), a prostitute

(y�ujo) and a sycophant (taikomochi).15 Compositionally, figure 2 renders the chaos

and unruliness of the mass of frightened and threatened monsters, whose bodies are

simultaneously congealed and distinct. Figure 3 organises the pictorial plane much

more neatly, isolating each of the five people in his or her framed photographic

representation. Yet, by adding to the compound of Chinese characters whose mean-

ing would otherwise simply be ‘photographic picture’ (shashin ga), a reading mark

(furigana) in a Japanese syllabary that reads utsushi-e (copied pictures), Takabatake

and Kawanabe use the prevalence of portrait photographs around 1875 to suggest

Figure 1. Umeda Photographic Studio,

Tokyo, Self-portrait of a Studio Photographer,

mid-Meiji period, 1868–1912, Collection of

Komori Takayuki, reproduced from Nihon

shashin zensh�u, Vol. 1, Tokyo: Shogakukan1985, 101. Permission sought.

15 – The sixth image depicts the very eating

establishment where the stories of the

characters were told and heard.

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Figure 2. The first illustration in Takabatake Ransen’s Kaika hyaku monogatari (A Hundred Tales of Monstrous Transformation), illustrated by Kawanabe

Kyosai, 1875. Courtesy of Takagi Gen.

Figure 3. The second illustration in Takabatake Ransen’s Kaika hyaku monogatari (A Hundred Tales of Monstrous Transformation), illustrated by Kawanabe

Kyosai, 1875. The caption enclosed within the cartouche reads ‘Transforming into monstrosity through the newly invented Projected Picture’ (Shinhatsumei

Utsushie no henka). Courtesy of Takagi Gen.

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satirically that such photographs do not provide an accurate portrayal of their

subjects. In the vignettes that follow, each of the five people is revealed as transform-

ing into a monster, contrary to the categorical identification assigned by titles such as

‘gentleman’ and ‘courtesan’, thus gesturing towards the gap between socially con-

structed categories and the individual personalities that subvert the accepted norms

of behaviour associated with those categories. Figure 3 adds another layer of meaning

by providing the reading mark ‘monsters’ (bakemono) next to the Chinese characters

for ‘transformation/to transform’ (henka) at the end of the caption in the cartouche.

Here, Takabatake and Kawanabe together throw new light on the nature of ‘trans-

formation’ that the slogan ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ encouraged by pointing

out the gap between what that slogan promised in theory and what it brought about

physically. The photographic portrait, identified by Takabatake and Kawanabe as an

example of such ‘transformation’, is deceitful and untrustworthy at best. Fittingly,

each carte-de-visite on this page is assigned a caption that designates the images as

‘monster of’ (no bakemono), rather than ‘portrait of’ (no shozo).

These contrasting symbolic and literal framings of photographic portraits – one

portraying a confident practitioner of photography, and the other a weary and

sceptical use of the photographic portrait as a representation of an individual –

attest to the fact that although photography’s undeniable origin in the West was

widely recognised and shared, the interpretation of the technology’s implications

and utility was far from uniform in the early to mid-Meiji period.

The Concentration of Photographic Studios in Asakusa

In his impressive Expanded Record of Things in Meiji (Zotei Meiji jibutsu kigen, 1936),

Ishi Kendo cites two relevant evaluations of photography from historical sources:

‘Chinkikisoi notes various shops that sold photographs were thriving by 1874’, and

‘Buko nenpyo notes that starting around 1873 and 1874, shops selling photographic

portraits of landscapes, courtesans, and kabuki actors emerged, and the number of

those shops that sell only portraits had doubled since’.16 Although Ishi’s remarks do

not specify a particular city or neighbourhood, they are an important reminder that,

by the mid-1870s, photographic representation had disseminated into the material

and popular culture accessible to ordinary Japanese people as an aspect of celebrity

culture. Indeed, photographic portraits had become so popular that a photographer

couldmake a living solely by selling cartes-de-visite of celebrity actors and courtesans.

The ‘Graded Evaluation of Tokyo Photographers’ from 1877 (figure 4), often

cited to document the popularity of photographic studios in early Meiji Japan,

specifically shows the preponderance of photographers in the Asakusa area. Using

the common format of ranking known as banzuke, this popular system evaluated a

variety of professions, such as sumo wrestlers, actors and samurai, as well as popular

pastimes such as visiting gardens and hot springs.17 In the 1877 evaluation, the

photographers in Tokyo are divided into two groups, at the right and left of the page,

with the size of the script corresponding to the judged importance of each photo-

grapher. At the centre of the flyer are the categories of referees, pioneers, elders and

promoters who stand beyond and outside of the ranking. Of the 116 photographers

deemed worthy of making the list, nineteen operated strictly within the Asakusa area.

If we include those whose shops were near Asakusa, such as those in the pleasure

quarter Shin Yoshiwara, this number increases to twenty-six. Even without doing so,

one in every six of the most highly ranked photographic shops was located in

Asakusa.

What is more significant is that the two promoters of photography (kanjinmoto)

listed here are Yokoyama Matsusaburo, who operated a studio in Ueno, about 2 km

West of Asakusa, and Kitaniwa Tsukuba, the host of the 1881 commemorative

banquet described at the outset of this article, who had already opened two studios

in Asakusa in 1871. Yokoyama Matsusaburo (1838–84) initially learned photogra-

phy from the Russian diplomat Iosif Goshkevich in Hokkaido, his birthplace.

16 – Ishi Kendo, Zotei Meiji jibutsu kigen,

Tokyo: Shunyodo 1936, 470.

17 – For the diverse subjects that early Meiji

banzuke rankings covered, see ibid., 821–42.

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Figure 4. Graded Evaluation of Tokyo

Photographers, 1877. Reproduced from

Kinoshita Naoyuki, Shashin garon, Tokyo:

Iwanami shoten, 22.

Figure 5. Kusakabe Kimbei, Asakusa Temple at Tokio, hand-coloured albumen print, late nineteenth century. Courtesy of The New York Public Library,

Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchdetail.

cfm?strucID=139604&imageID=110043.

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When Yokoyama opened his studio in Ueno, it also served as a private academy

where students studied painting, sketching, and photography. Born in the

Nihonbashi area of Edo, Kitaniwa Tsukuba (1842–87) studied photography under

Yokoyama Matsusaburo, and then with Ukai Gyokusen, Kuze Jisaku, and Shimooka

Renjo. Kitaniwa operated two studios in Asakusa, one in Hanayashiki and the other

in Okuyama, where he is said to have displayed exercising equipment as a way to

attract more clients, and was active until 1885.18 In the directory of popular trends

published in 1885, the Detailed Record of Trends in Tokyo (Tokyo ry�uko saikenki),

Shimizu Ichijiro ranked photographers in Tokyo by their ability and reputation.19

Following the already popular format of ranking courtesan houses in the pleasure

quarters, the listing gives a graded evaluation above the name of each photographer

included. Two of the eight photographers who received the most prestigious rating

of three triangle marks (hinode shinry�uko, indicating ‘a newly rising sun’) – Ezaki

Reiji and NakajimaMatsuchi – had their studios in Asakusa; in addition, three of the

nine who received two triangles (hibi ry�uko, ‘popular daily’) – Kitaniwa Tsukuba,

Uchida Kuichi, and Tsurubuchi Hatsuzo – had set up their studios in Asakusa area.20

If we turn to the much more recent list of photographers and suppliers in the early

decades of the Meiji, compiled by the Japan Camera Museum in 2000, we learn that

at least twenty photographic studios opened in Asakusa during the first decade,

between 1868 and 1878, followed by three new studios between 1878 and 1888.21

These rankings and numbers of portrait studios in early Meiji Asakusa shed light on

two important historical facts: that Asakusa not only accommodated a large number

of photographic studios, but also housed two photographers who were seen as avid

promoters of photography in Tokyo; and that the photographers chose to set up

their studios in Asakusa around the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, and

continued to thrive well into the 1880s.22

The number of photographic studios and shops would reach its peak in the early

1880s, when there were more than forty in the Asakusa area.23 This concentration

declined after the mid-1880s, when the city of Tokyo divided Asakusa into seven

smaller administrative units. The historical name ‘Asakusa Okuyama’ continued to

be used (rather than the new administrative designation of the area as Asakusa Goku,

the fifth district of Asakusa), but a new area known as Rokku (the sixth district) was

established to the west of an artificial pond. Slowly, the spectacle shows (misemono)

and photographic shops moved to Asakusa Rokku, and the centre of Asakusa

entertainment shifted to this area.24 In 1896, a fire burned most of the Asakusa

Okuyama area, and around the same time photographic cameras and dry plates

became commercially available for private ownership to a wider public, marking the

end of the concentration of photographic studios in Asakusa.25

How was it possible for this neighbourhood, which covered barely seventeen-

thousand square feet, to sustain several dozen photographic studios? Certainly, the

area benefitted from the large number of visitors to its central landmark, the Senso-ji

temple, which had been a site of pilgrimage since the Tokugawa period. But many

other sites in Tokyo were equally popular, Ryogoku, Tsukishima and Atago Hill

being but a few examples. Photographic studios were set up in these areas as well, as

were new tourist attractions such as Ueno Park, yet the level of concentration of

photographic studios at other sites never matched their density in Asakusa. If we

follow one of the dominant narratives of early photographic history that photo-

graphy served as a governmental tool to encourage ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’,

it would seem that we would find more commercial photographic studios in the

Ueno area, which the Meiji government designated as the urban centre for activities

related to ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’. An educational museum, the prototype

of the National Museum of Science, was built in Ueno in 1877, followed by the

national museum in 1881. The Ueno zoo, the oldest in the country, opened its doors

in 1882. The first university to teach fine art, Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko, was located there

and began accepting students in 1887.26 While the Meiji government exhibited

photographic images in the context of domestic exhibitions in Ueno, thus

18 – Mori Mayumi, Meiji Tokyo kijinden,

Tokyo: Shinchosha 1996, 17–23; and Ozawa,

Bakumatsu Meiji no shashin, 230–6. For

Kitaniwa, see Ozawa, Bakumatsu Meiji no

shashin, 244–51; and Izakura Naomi and

Torin Boyd, Sepia iro no shozo, Tokyo: Asahi

Sonorama 2000, 245–6.

19 – Shimizu Ichijiro, Tokyo ry�uko saikenki,Tokyo: Shimizu Ichijiro 1885, 9.

20 – It is noteworthy that, despite the fact

that Uchida Kuichi had died a decade earlier,

the studios continued to use his name in

their business. I thank Luke Gartlan for

pointing this out to me. In 1880 Nakajima

Matsuchi and Tsurubuchi Hatsuzo had also

produced educational lantern slides in their

photographic studios at the request of the

Meiji government. Iwamoto Kenji, Gento no

seiki: eiga zenya no shichobunka, Tokyo:

Shinwa Sha 2002, 127. See also the exhibition

catalogue Nippon no eizoten – utsushie

katsudoshashin benshi, Tokyo: Waseda

Daigaku Tsubouchi Hakushi Kinen Engeki

Hakubutsukan 2008.

21 – Izakura and Boyd, Sepia iro no shozo,

75–209.

22 – Two Tokyo tourist guides by Kodama

Eisei, published in 1881 and 1884, include a

list of photographers in Tokyo in which four

out of the first ten photographers are located

in Asakusa. See Kodama Eisei, Kaisei Tokyo

annai, Tokyo: Okura Magobei 1881; and

Kodama Eisei, Tokyo annai, Tokyo: Kineido

1884. In both guidebooks, Asakusa is the first

entry in the category ‘locations ofmisemono’.

23 – Ozawa, Bakumatsu Meiji no shashin,

167.

24 – Japan’s first panorama theatre was built

in Asakusa Rokku in 1890, and a diorama

theatre followed in 1895. Each theatre

displayed both scenic views and dramatic

tableaux of historical events such as the

American civil war, the Sino-Japanese War,

and the ceremony of the Promulgation of the

Meiji Constitution. Furukawa Miki,

Misemono no rekishi, Tokyo: Y�uzankaku

1970, 301; and Yamamoto Shogetsu, Meiji

seso hyakuwa, Tokyo: Daiichi Shobo 1936,

187.

25 – See, for instance, the number of

advertisements for personal photographic

cameras that began to appear in newspapers,

as cited in Hajima Tomoyuki (ed.), Shinbun

kokoku bijutsu taikei, Tokyo: Ozora Sha 1999.

Asahi shinbun reported that the fire of 10

April 1896 began past noon at the

Daikokuya, where the ikiningyo spectacle of

the revenge of the Forty-seven Ronin

(leaderless samurai) was on view. Asakusa

was particularly crowded that day because it

was the season for cherry-blossom viewing.

Asahi shinbun (11 April 1896), chokan, 4.

26 – For a comparison of the historical

identities of Ueno Park and Asakusa, see

Kinoshita Naoyuki, ‘Asakusa to Ueno,

aruiwa Misemono to Hakurankai ni tsuite’,

in Dai Misemono, ed. and pub. Tabako to

Shio no Hakubutsukan, Tokyo 2003, 104–7.

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insinuating photography into the newly constructed image of the westernised and

industrialised Japan, photographers seems to have turned away from the lead of the

government. Instead, many chose to open their studios in Asakusa.

If, as the prominent historian of technology Yoshida Mitsukuni has argued,

photography indeed began to be incorporated into the cultural system of

‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ in the early Meiji as ‘a technology that fixes the

image bearing a new objectivity’, then the practices of photographers and photo-

graphic studios in Asakusa created a challenging historical landscape: an urban space

that played upon the idea of constant and consistent visual transformation, and thus

upon the improbability of achieving objectivity – or any fixed status, for that matter–

of pictorial representation.27 The high concentration of photographic studios in

Asakusa also belied the characterisation of the camera as an unfamiliar and fearful

device. Faced with the prevailing superstitions about photography in the popular

mind, how were the studios in Asakusa able to overcome people’s trepidation to the

point that taking one’s photograph there became part of a typical tourist’s

itinerary?28

Asakusa and Popular Entertainment in the Early Meiji

In fact, by the 1880s the Asakusa area, and particularly the Senso-ji temple (from

which Asakusa derived its name), had long been a popular subject of so-called

Yokohama photographs, a type of photographic print produced for and consumed

by foreign tourists.29 These representations construe Asakusa as a scenic and cultural

destination for foreigners, and emphasise the clear visual importance of the temple to

the area. Take, for example, a photograph byKusakabeKimbei of the Senso-ji (figure 5):

the prominent pagoda dominates the composition, and its dark red colour,

added later by an artisan, further accentuates its centrality and material solidity.

The smaller houses in the foreground, built with thatched roofs, create a visual

contrast between the ceramic tiles of the pagoda and the temple structures seen

on the left, behind and to the right of the pagoda. The juxtaposition of the

zigzagging lines of the overlapping thatched roofs with the singular finial (sourin)

atop the pagoda adds another layer of contrast between disarrayed ground

structures and pristine, orderly temple structures. The commanding five-storey

pagoda is thus presented as a recognisable and visually digestible landmark that

conveys the desired image of Japan as depicted in other Yokohama photographs.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that despite the growing number and popu-

larity of photographic shops in the area, they were not captured in these Yokohama

photographs. Instead, the photographic representations of Asakusa from the early

Meiji recursively treat the pagoda as the signifier – and symbol – both of the

perceptible exoticism and of importance of religion in the neighbourhood.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Yokohama photographers thus excluded

the imagery of popular entertainments from their work, although writers from the

period provide textual sources that give us a sense of what is rendered invisible in the

photographs.

When reading accounts from the 1880s describing the first decade of Meiji in

Asakusa, one is struck by the common characterisation of the area as one of the few

places that continued to evoke the atmosphere of the previous Tokugawa (or Edo)

period.30 Writers and journalists alike comment that Asakusa not only retained an

air of the past, like an isolated and guarded time capsule, but actually thrived because

it was able to sustain that air through its business activities. Indeed, these writers

often using adjectives such as ‘okuyamateki’ (Okuyama-ish) and ‘edoteki’ (Edo-ish)

to convey the atmosphere that residents of Asakusa discerned in the area. Cultural

critic and writer Uchida Roan noted that:

Asakusa still exuded the feeling of the Edo period until 1881 and 1882. One ofthe reasons was that the old fellows of Edo [period], such as Chikuzan,

27 – Yoshida Mitsukuni, ‘Meiji shashin ko’,

in Shikaku no j�uky�useiki – ningen gijutsu

bunmei, ed. Yokoyama Toshio, Kyoto:

Shinbunkaku Shuppan 1992, 158.

28 – See Mio Wakita, ‘Selling Japan:

Kusakabe Kimbei’s Image of Japanese

Women’, History of Photography, 33:2

(2009), 218; and Ozawa, Bakumatsu Meiji no

shashin, 247–8.

29 – The term ‘Yokohama photography’ is

derived from the fact that Yokohama, 20

miles west of Tokyo, was one of the first port

cities to open to foreign trade and settlement

in 1859.Western photographers such as Felix

Beato, Baron von Stillfried, John Wilson,

Orrin Freeman, and Adolfo Farsari resided in

Yokohama and trained many Japanese

photographers there. In recent years, many

scholarly studies on Yokohama photography

have been published. See, for instance, Luke

Gartlan, ‘Changing Views: The Early

Topographical Photographs of Stillfried &

Company’, in Reflecting Truth: Japanese

Photography in the Nineteenth Century, ed.

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere and Mikiko

Hirayama, Amsterdam: Hotei Publishing

2004, 40–65; Allen Hockley, ‘Packaged

Tours: Photo Albums and Their

Implications for the Study of Early Japanese

Photography’, in Reflecting Truth, ed.

Rousemaniere and Hirayama, 66–85; Mio,

‘Selling Japan’; and Ishiguro Keisho,

Shimooka Renjo shashinsh�u/Renjo Shimooka:

The Pioneer Photographer in Japan, Tokyo:

Shinchosha 1999.

30 – Uchida Roan, Omoidasu hitobito,

Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo 1947, 167.

Contemporary historian Tanaka Seidai

concurs, stating that: ‘there is no problem in

regarding Asakusa as a continuation of the

Edo period until 1881 (Meiji 14)’. Tanaka

Seidai, Nihon no koen, Tokyo: Kashima

Shoten 1993, 79.

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Shimooka Renjo and Ugai Sanji, would congregate in the Senso-ji temple areaand show their tastes and hobbies informed by Edo-period fashion.31

Awashima Kangetsu, a writer, artist and collector who until 1893 lived in Asakusa,

noted that ‘the destructive force of Restoration reached Asakusa last, and thus until

around the 1880s, the area of Asakusa still maintained and exuded the atmosphere of

the bygone period’.32

Here we face a question: if photography was merely a symbol of westernisation

and being photographed a largely unwelcome and fearful experience, then how could

these observers have contextualised photographic studios as an extension of

Tokugawa cultural practices? In other words, if Asakusa was indeed an area in

which bygone practices were still available, then how did photographic studios

blend in with or upset such an atmosphere? To turn the question around, in what

way was the area of Asakusa an appropriate and profitable market for the new

enterprise of photography?

Yamamoto Shogetsu, a journalist raised in Asakusa, gives an insightful account

that serves as a springboard for this investigation, enabling us to see, as it were, the

elements of visual culture that are absent in photographic representations such as

figure 5. Recalling his childhood neighbourhood in A Hundred Tales about Meiji

Society (Meiji seso hyakuwa, 1936), Yamamoto wrote:

When photography was still young, for whatever reason, photographers, start-ing with Ezaki [Reiji] and Kitaniwa [Tsukuba], set up their studios in the thirdand fifth wards of Asakusa, in the area starting just behind the [structure thathoused the] Goddess of Mercy and extending to Hanayashiki Street.33 Therewere over twenty shops there. Sure, teahouses and archery houses were inbetween the studios, but most of the shops were photography studios. Inaddition to these two that I mentioned, there were shops by Kishio,Wanatabe, Tani, Matsuzaki, both good and not-so-good studios, all of whichhad barkers (hippari) in front of their shops to bring in more clients. [. . .]Except for Ezaki, whose studio was built of brick, the other shops were built withfake Western-looking facades, painted over, with a shop curtain that coveredtheir entrances (about 3 shaku, 1 metre, wide), and glass showcase windows onboth sides of the entrance. Just as you entered, there was a studio that was a lotlike the waiting area for rickshaws, with its floor covered in linoleum. In thisroom was an old-looking chair with a neck-rest, similar to the ones found inbarbershops. Although Ezaki was the first one to use the ‘fast machine’ (1883,dry plates), everyone else was still using the old style machine (wet collodion).Especially when the photographers were trying to photograph children, theycreated such a scene. Photographers, technicians, and the clients all played rattledrums, or the bugle, to get the attention of the children.

At these types of photo studios, as soon as anyone paused in front of the shop,a man whose job was to bring in clients would come through the shop curtains.‘How about a photograph as a souvenir? A glass positive starts around 15 sen,and I’ll give you a discount. What do you think?’ These guys were really loudand wouldn’t leave you alone. Those people from the country usually gotpushed into the shop as the loud guy pulled their sleeves. The shop wouldstart with selling the easy glass positive, a small one that could immediately beplaced inside a paulina-wood box, and gave it to the clients for 15 sen. But whathappened more often was that the shop would convince the clients to get whatthey call ‘normal photographs,’ which, for one set of three prints, costs 50 sen.The clients would pay the shop reluctantly.34

As Yamamoto’s description of the barkers implies, photographers and their associ-

ates in Asakusa did not always have a stellar reputation. In the crowded area of

Asakusa, the soliciting activities of the hippari (also known as yabiki or kyakubiki)

had reached the point of attracting police intervention by June 1880. According to a

newspaper report from that month, a total of twenty-seven ‘shameless photogra-

phers’ received a ‘serious warning’ from the police.35 Yamamoto’s description

showcases the continuous presence of the barkers as a way to attract clients, a ploy

popularised by the entertainment practices of the area since the Tokugawa period.

31 – Uchida, Omoidasu hitobito, 167.

32 – Awashima Kangetsu, quoted in Horikiri

Naoto, Asakusa: Edo Meiji hen, Tokyo: Ubun

Shoin 2005, 278. Awashima began operating

a diorama theatre in the area in 1879, right

next to Denpo-in temple, setting up a simple

shack to show oil paintings as well as

portraits of Napoleon and the Pope. Uchida,

Omohidasu hitobito, 139–68.

33 – The Asakusa Senso-ji area was

designated as one of the first ‘parks’ (koen)

by the government in 1876, but the changes

were only made on the level of nominal

designation. The Meiji government began

construction to physically change the area

into a park in 1881. See Tanaka, Nihon no

koen, 85–92.

34 – Yamamoto, Meiji seso hyakuwa, 33–34.

35 – In the original Japanese, ‘shameless

photographers’ is rendered as ‘hajishirazu no

shashinya domo’. Yomiuri shinbun (3 June

1880), chokan, 2. The sense of lesser respect

reflected in the word shashinya in the

newspaper (as opposed to shashinshi) echoes

the observation by John Dower that ‘[a]s

photographers became more popular,

however, photographers became less

esteemed’. John W. Dower, ‘Introduction’,

in A Century of Japanese Photography, 9.

Borrowing a description by Hosoma

Hiromichi, the contemporary historian

Horikiri Naoto writes in his book on

historical Asakusa that some of these

solicitors were interested not in selling

portraits but in trying to find a prostitute for

their male clients. See Horikiri, Asakusa, 283.

Although further analysis is required, this

practice echoes the tactics and rhetoric of

these barkers and those employed by

vaudeville shows in the United States and

Europe. See, for instance, Brooks

McNamera, ‘Talking’, Drama Review 31:2

(1987), 39–56.

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What was different from the set-up of Tokugawa spectacle shows was the necessity of

a permanent structure for photographic studios. Whereas Tokugawa spectacle per-

formances had taken place in the reed-screened enclosures and temporary shacks

that filled the streets of Asakusa during festivals, the business of a photographic

studio could not be carried out successfully in a removable booth. Photographers

required a glass window (or skylight, sometimes open to the air) to allow light to

enter as much as possible, and they also needed space for the studio backdrops that

were an important part of portrait photographs.36 Yamamoto’s description also

provides us a sense of affordability of photographic portrait in the early days of

Meiji. For instance, in the late 1870s, a sweet bean-paste bun cost 1 sen, and a bowl of

soba noodles 0.8 sen. In 1878, 15 sen, the cost for a portrait in collodion positive on

glass, was the average amount earned daily by amale farmer, and one-third of a metal

smith’s daily earnings.37 In other words, having a portrait photograph of oneself was

not prohibitively expensive but fairly affordable. By way of comparison, it cost 2 sen,

one-seventh of the price of a collodion positive on glass, to view Matsumoto

Kisaburo’s living dolls spectacle, to which I will return later in this article, Record

of the Miracles of Kannon from the Thirty-three Temples of the Saigoku in 1879 in

Osaka.38

Yamamoto also highlights another business tactic common among the photo-

graphers: luring clients into their shops with the promise of a cheap positive, and

then offering reproductions on paper for a higher price.39 Invented by Scott Archer

in 1851, wet-collodion on glass produced a negative image from which reproduc-

tions could bemade. The reproducibility and shorter exposure time of wet-collodion

on glass (or known as ambrotype in the United States), gave a decided advantage for

photographic industry over the irreproducible daguerreotypes, and became a domi-

nant process by the 1870s in Japan. In addition, the negative image on glass in

wet-collodion could appear to be a positive image when placed against a black

background, which Yamamoto refers as ‘easy glass positive’ in his account. Using

the wet-collodion on glass as a negative, photographers could reproduce multiple

reproductions from the plate on paper treated with egg white (hence the term

‘albumen prints’), which were described as ‘normal photographs’ by photographers

in Asakusa, as Yamamoto recollects.40

As we have seen in Yamamoto’s remarks, photographic studios in Asakusa

adopted the familiar sales tactics used by popular spectacle performances, thereby

acclimatising to the neighbourhood through already familiar patterns of transac-

tions. At the same time, the studios took advantage of the technological possibilities

that the wet-collodion positive on glass offered, transforming the portrait image of a

client from a singular image on glass into multiples on paper.41 The option of seeing

one’s image in a hand-held size, both on glass as a positive and as an image

reproduced on paper, must have been an unfamiliar and dissonant sensation for

ordinary people to whom such opportunities were not commonly available.

In light of the commercial contexts that Yamamoto describes, Kitaniwa’s display

of life-sized photographs at his 1881 banquet can be posited as an extension of the

Asakusa business practices that amplified dissonant seeing. By enlarging his negatives

to create life-sized photographic representations of the old men whom he had posed

in accord with the iconography of the famed sixteen arhats, and then enhancing the

similitude of representation by adorning the free-standing photographs with actual

clothing, Kitaniwa invited his guests to experience the resulting dissonance at a

minimum of two levels: treatment (figurines wearing actual clothing), and medium

(religious icons in photography).

Synergetic Business Practices in Asakusa Okuyama

From the perspective of commerce, the area of Asakusa thrived due to a set of

practices that enhanced the business opportunities for spectacle shows (misemono),

kabuki theatres and the licensed brothels of the pleasure quarter by creating a synergy

36 – The Meiji government began to

eliminate temporary structures in popular

entertainment areas including Asakusa in

1872.

37 – For a relative cost of everyday products

and wages, see Morinaga Takuro (ed.),Meiji

taisho showa heisei bukka no bunkashi jiten,

Tokyo: Tenbo Sha 2009.

38 – Kawazoe, Edo no Misemono, 200.

39 – Hattori Seiichi’s New Record of

Prosperous Tokyo (Tokyo shin hanjoki, 1874)

notes that glass positives cost 0.25 yen per

positive, versus 0.50–0.75 yen for a paper

print. Quoted in Yoshida, ‘Meiji shashin ko’,

160.

40 – Albumen prints were introduced to

Japan by 1863.

41 – Tintype photography, which uses the

wet-collodion process on a sheet of metal,

did not spread in Japan at all. Moreover, the

practice of selling both glass positives and

albumen prints made from the negative was

not unique to Asakusa. In Yokohama, where

photographic studios sold souvenir images

of Japan to a foreign clientele, the products

were exclusively albumen prints, and the

wet-collodion negatives came to constitute a

valuable body of property that would be sold

and reused.

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that extended the scope of visual references unique to the Asakusa area. For example,

the presence of barkers and the use of a decoy outside a shop to attract more business

became established practice during the Tokugawa period. What particularly interests

me here is the synergetic orchestration of events and production of goods that

celebrated and extended the refined sensitivity to the visuality of objects that

enveloped Asakusa.

As Kusakabe Kimbei aptly asserts visually, the primary source of attraction and

defining landmark of Asakusa as a cultural space was the Senso-ji temple. During the

Tokugawa period, Senso-ji included thirty-four temples and shrines in its precinct,

covering about 93.4 acres, and was a popular day excursion both for the samurai class

and for commoners. In addition to these visitors to the temple, Asakusa attracted

people to two types of leisure activity located nearby: just a few blocks east of the

temple was the kabuki theatre district, Saruwaka-cho, and a few blocks north was

the officially sanctioned pleasure quarter, Shin Yoshiwara. Saruwaka-cho had been

the major theatre district since the Tokugawa authorities had forced three major

theatre companies to move there in 1842, as part of the Tenpo reforms.

Already during the Tokugawa period, Okuyama, the western end of the Senso-ji

precinct, had thrived as the prime spot for what Andrew Markus describes as

‘kaleidoscopic cultural phenomena’ that were akin to street spectacle shows.42 As

historian Nam-lin Hur has revealed in his Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan:

Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society, the Asakusa area turned two faces to the public

during the Tokugawa period: those of prayer and play. Some of the featured

performances at the spectacles were lewd and lascivious, and spectacles that dis-

played the deformities and private parts of the human body were not scarce.43 The

central landmark of Asakusa – Senso-ji and its adjacent temples and shrines – had

over the years formulated a synchronic economic and cultural system that benefitted

both the sacred pilgrimage site of the temple itself and the misemono, which drew

more crowds to the area. Despite the stricter regulations imposed by the Meiji

government to ‘control’ the general morals of the entertainment areas, themisemono

in Asakusa continued to thrive well into themid-Meiji period.44 Indeed, according to

governmental taxation statistics taken between 1879 and 1881, the amount of tax

paid by the Asakusa ward increased steadily over these three years, exceeding that of

other popular entertainment areas in Tokyo.45

What I want to call attention to here is what separated – and thus defined –

Asakusa’s popular entertainments (misemono) from those of the Ryogoku area,

another hotbed of spectacle shows. Asakusa was known for its displays of ‘living

dolls’ (ikiningyo) and woven-bamboo figurines and animals (kagozaiku), whereas

Ryogoku frequently staged shows of strange and novel animals, such as camels and

elephants. Put differently, the defining attraction of spectacles in Asakusa hinged on

the staged visual transformation of the human body into a different format and

medium of representation. The ‘dissonant seeing’ in these shows explored the wide

range of possibilities in transforming the human body, yet differed from the seeing

offered by freak shows, in that the visual pleasure involved was aimed at the

unfamiliar experience of seeing a familiar subject in a new form. The spectacle

shows of ‘living dolls’ presented a set scene that was staged with life-like wooden

mannequins.46 Beginning in the final decades of the Tokugawa period, these life-like

mannequins became extremely popular, defining Asakusa spectacles until the 1890s,

a period that curiously coincides with the emergence of photographic studios in the

same area.

A photograph by Ezaki Reiji, one of the most prominent and reputable photo-

graphers in Asakusa, further extends this play on transforming the material and

accentuating the experience of dissonant seeing focusing on the human body (figure 6).

The portrait is of Saba Kiroku, who founded the textile company Nihon Orimono in

1887, and a ‘living doll’ of Princess Shirataki, a legendary Shinto goddess. The

princess, taller and more dominant in appearance than Saba, is wearing the patented

textile manufactured by Saba’s company. According to historian Kinoshita Naoyuki,

42 – Andrew Markus, ‘The Carnival of Edo:

Misemono Spectacles from Contemporary

Accounts’,Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies,

45:2 (1985), 449–541. Probably the most

comparable example of misemono in the

western context would be vaudeville

performances in late-nineteenth-century

America.

43 – Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late

Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo

Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press 2000. Hur writes that such exhibits of

unusual human deformities in Asakusa,

‘object lessons in the Buddhist principles of

karmic reward and punishment, offered a

graphic demonstration of Buddhist

commercialism’. Ibid., 61.

44 – In February 1868, the Meiji government

prohibited sexually explicit woodblock

prints and spectacle shows in Tokyo because

they were ‘indecent and disgraceful

(migurushii) for the capital of our country’.

In 1872, a further prohibition was added to

deter exhibitions of male and female nudity

in the forms of sumo wresting and snake

handling. The prohibition on nudity for

male wrestling was later modified. Moreover,

there continued to be performances that

managed to escape official suppression, as

exemplified by a performance by a female

amputee in Asakusa in 1881. Furukawa,

Misemono no sekai, 292; and FurukawaMiki,

Zusetsu Somin Geino: Edo no misemono,

Tokyo: Y�usankaku Shuppan 1993, 295. Also

see Ishi, Zotei Meiji jibutsu kigen, 23–5.

45 – Ogi Shinzo, Tokyo shomin seikatsushi

kenky�u, Tokyo: Nihon Hoso Shuppan

Kyokai 1979, 332–40. Ogi’s summary of the

popular entertainments for the masses in

early Meiji also indicates that both

temporary and permanent spectacle shows

were set up in the Asakusa area, and that

spring and summer were the most lucrative

months for the shows. By 1881, Asakusa

ward paid six times more tax than Fukagawa

ward, where Ryogoku is located.

46 – Although it is beyond the scope of this

article, the striking similarity between these

‘living dolls’ spectacles and tableau vivants of

late-nineteenth-century Europe should be

noted here.

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Saba was inspired by a representation of Princess Shirataki at Orihime shrine (the

name ‘Orihime’ means ‘Princess of Weaving’) and included a representation of the

princess in a patent label for his textile, which we see in the bottom right of figure 6. To

pray for the prosperity of his new company, he then commissioned Yasumoto

Kamehachi, a noted artisan of ‘living dolls’, to make a life-sized representation of

Princess Shirataki based on the two-dimensional rendering on the patent label. Saba

later donated the ‘living doll’ to the Orihime shrine as a holy relic (shintai), although it

is unclear whether he initially intended the figurine as such. The photograph dates

from 1894, when Saba visited Ezaki’s studio in Asakusa with the wooden mannequin

of Princess Shirataki.47

Here we witness many levels of play with visualising and representing a human

body: originally represented by a two-dimensional portrait at Orihime shrine, then

in a trademark label, the princess was transformed in Yasumoto’s hands into a life-

sized three-dimensional figurine, which was then photographed by Ezaki. What

makes this photographic representation particularly revealing is the fact that Saba,

the person who initiated all these layers and levels of visual transformation, stands

next to the imaginary and yet physically present figurine of the princess.

Also in 1894, there was a synergetic production at the Meiji-za theatre of a joruri

puppet play in which Princess Shirataki ‘played’ the protagonist. According to

Figure 6. Ezaki Reiji, Saba Kiroku and

Princess Shirataki, albumen print, 1894.

Reproduced from Kinoshita Naoyuki,

‘Ningyo wo koerumono’, Hyonna Kotokara:

1850nendai–1950nendai Nippon he no tabi,

Tokyo: Akishobo forthcoming 2012.

47 – Kinoshita Naoyuki, Bessatsu taiyo,

Misemono wa omoshiroi, 140; Hyonna

kotokara: 1850nendai—1950nendai Nippon

he no tabi, Tokyo: Akishobo forthcoming

2012.

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Tamura Shigeyoshi, a fervid theatre fan (and later the manager of a kabuki theatre)

who chronicled his visits to theatres from 1859 to 1903, this performance ‘proved

unexpectedly popular, continuing to bring in wonderful audiences from the first day.

The theatre decided to extend the performance and is thriving superbly’.48 The

promotional business practice here – producing a theatrical play as an advertisement

of Saba Kiroku’s textile company – is tellingly suggestive of similar promotions that

had been integrated into business practices in Asakusa during the Tokugawa period.

Asakusa’s proximity to the theatre district of Saruwaka-cho and to the licensed

brothels of Shin Yoshiwara also guaranteed flowing crowds for the area. Similar

spectacle shows, theatres and brothels continued to operate in the neighbourhood of

Asakusa throughout the turbulent years of the Restoration and on into the early

decades of the Meiji period. In other words, in addition to the tourists who came to

see the Senso-ji and adjacent spectacle shows, business establishments in Asakusa

could count on those who visited the theatre district and pleasure quarter as

potential clients. Indeed, photographic studios in Asakusa immediately seized

upon the business opportunities presented by these added waves of foot traffic and

began to sell portraits of famous kabuki actors and courtesans.49

When the newly formedMeiji government took charge of the country in 1868, it

allowed each of the three major kabuki companies in Saruwaka-cho to relocate

anywhere it wished. However, the three companies did not immediately leave the

area.50 Photographic studios in Asakusa took advantage of the culture of celebrity in

such neighbouring establishments. In the celebrity portraits they sold to the public

(figures 7, 8), the actors appear in their kabuki roles, transformed into a visually

recognisable theatrical character. The production of these portrait images of the

entertainers near Asakusa was an extension of accepted business practices that had

permeated the area since the Tokugawa period. As historians have shown, serialised

ukiyo-e (floating world) woodblock prints of kabuki actors, famous courtesans, and

teahouse salesgirls proliferated during the Tokugawa period.51

A June 1875 report in Yomiuri shinbun notes that a group of women aged sixteen

or seventeen to thirty-four or thirty-five had been found walking around Asakusa

wearing hairpins bearing photographic portraits of their favourite kabuki actors or

chatting away about their favourites with the actors’ portrait photographs in their

hands. The writer of the article scorns these women for placing such objects on their

heads, the ‘most important part of the body’, adding that ‘this practice of putting

actors’ photographs in their hair is perhaps acceptable for courtesans and prostitutes,

but is a source of grave concern for daughters from respectable families’.52 We recall

from the beginning of this article that Kitaniwa gave the guests at his banquet

presents of hand towels and hairpins that incorporated photographic portraits of

kabuki actors. Photographic studios profited from the sales of such accessories

(figure 9), which were an offshoot of their cultivation of the celebrity status of actors

by means of selling souvenir copies of actors’ photographic portraits. In other words,

the studios sold photographs that were the results of transformation and perfor-

mance (portraits of actors and courtesans), and also offered mass-produced utilitar-

ian items used for the toilet and for adornment (hand towels, hairpins) with which

customers could transform their own appearances.

Asakusa Okuyama and Visual Transformations: The Case of ‘Living Dolls’

Returning to the magnetic presence of ‘living dolls’ (ikiningyo) in Asakusa, I want to

explore further the cultural and visual relationship between this form of popular

culture and the life-sized photographs that Kitaniwa displayed at his 1881 banquet.

Two craftsmen became known as the master makers of living dolls: Matsumoto

Kisaburo and the aforementioned Yasumoto Kamehachi. The popular subjects of

‘living dolls’ displays during the Tokugawa period included mythological and fic-

tional stories (TheWater Margin, The Hag of an Old House, a local legend of Asakusa)

as well as imagined everyday situations, such as a scene of courtesans bathing.

48 –Tamura Shigeyoshi, Zokuzoku kabuki

nendaiki, Tokyo: Ichimura za 1922, 667–8. In

a newspaper review of Meiji-za, an author

who went by the nom de plume of Imobei

wrote that ‘the last play was the puppet play

on Orihime, which had been highly praised

before. Despite the fact that it is an

advertisement show for Nihon Orimono the

play was interesting in the classical sense’.

Yomiuri shinbun (30 May 1894), chokan, 1.

49 – The popularity of souvenir

photographs, especially of landscapes,

famous actors, courtesans, and politicians,

was so great that the government issued the

first edict on photographic copyright in

1876. Ozawa, Bakumatsu Meiji no shashin,

227.

50 – The first kabuki theatre to leave

Saruwaka-cho was the Morita-za, which

relocated to the Nihonbashi area in 1872

under the new name Shintomi-za. The last to

move was the Ichimura-za, which left in 1892

to relocate in the Shimoya area. But during

the heyday of portrait photography in

Asakusa, two theatres (Ichimura-za and

Nakamura-za) were still thriving in

Saruwaka-cho.

51 – See, for instance, C. Andrew Gerstle,

Timothy Clark, and Akiko Yano, Kabuki

Heroes on the Osaka Stage, 1780–1830,

London: The British Museum 2005; and

Pora Bunka Kenky�ujo (ed.), Bakumatsu

Meiji bijincho, Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu Oraisha

2002. Mio Wakita and Eleanor Hight also

draw on the historical significance of the

practice of bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful

women) and actor prints in their studies of

female images in Yokohama photographs.

See Mio, ‘Selling Japan’; and Eleanor Hight,

‘Many Lives of Beato’s ‘‘Beauties’’’, in

Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race

and Place, ed. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary

D. Sampson, London:Routledge 2002, 126–58.

52 – Yomiuri shinbun (22 June 1875),

chokan, 2. Allen Hockley chronicles

foreigners’ responses to viewing ‘living dolls’

in Asakusa; the dolls were commonly

compared with Madame Tussaud’s wax

sculptures. Allen Hockley, ‘A Response to

Kinoshita Naoyuki: Foreign Perspectives on

‘‘Living Dolls’’ at Asakusa’, Impressions 32

(2011), 166–76.

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Figure 7. Carte-de-visite, Iwai Hanshiro of

Yamato-ya, albumen print on paper.

Collection of Nihon University, Department

of Fine Art.

Figure 8. Carte-de-visite, Onoe Kikugoro,

albumen print on paper. Collection of Nihon

University, Department of Fine Art.

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The celebrated Meiji-era critic, translator and novelist Uchida Roan maintained that

‘living dolls’ spectacles ‘did not become popular unless they were obscene and

cruel’.53 As Uchida’s words testify, the titillation and violence in these spectacle

shows were critical to their popularity. After the 1872 governmental restrictions on

the public exhibition of gore and nudity, the shows shifted towards more sober

subjects (for instance, the Taiwan Expedition of 1874, the Seinan civil war of 1877

and the story of the Forty-seven Ronin). Yet, the two basic premises of the spectacle

remained: the transformation of human characters, imagined or real, into life-sized

three-dimensional mannequins; and the role of an orator, standing next to the dolls,

provided narratives and comments.54 It is striking, then, that some of the spectacles

deliberately used visual and cultural references that were already available and widely

shared in the area of Asakusa, thus self-consciously incorporating local icons and

topographical signs into their shows. In other words, these spectacles served to

Figure 9. Hairpin with a photograph, circa

1900. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

53 – Uchida Roan, quoted in Horikiri,

Asakusa, 270.

54 – In fact, in an undated flyer for Yasumoto

Kamehachi’s ikiningyo spectacles, it is noted

that ‘loud and beautiful voices of

phonographs will be played’. See http://

www.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kotenseki/html/

bunko10/bunko10_08021_0013/index.html

(accessed February 2011).

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reinforce and articulate the particular local identity of Asakusa through the subjects

of the performances. Let us consider one such example: Matsumoto Kisaburo’s

charitable plan for the Senso-ji temple.

In April 1878, a decade after the Meiji Restoration, the ‘living dolls’ master

artisan Matsumoto Kisaburo announced his intention to produce and stage a set of

mannequins to help defray the debts of the Senso-ji temple. According to the news

report, Matsumoto was concerned about the declining financial state of the temple,

as well as the extent to which it was worrying the Buddhist monks there. In an

attempt to alleviate the temple’s financial constraints and the psychological stress on

the monks, Matsumoto decided to mount a show that would depict the spiritual

pilgrimage to the Senso-ji – a spectacle that, by incorporating sophisticated mechan-

ical tricks, ‘would astonish the viewers’. Matsumoto stated that he intended to

donate all profits from the show to the temple in hopes of cancelling its debt.55

This underscores Matsumoto’s strong personal affinity with the Senso-ji as a cultural

and religious institution and landmark of Asakusa, and his confidence that noble and

more sophisticated visual tricks ‘performed’ by the living dolls would draw large

crowds to Asakusa to solve the temple’s financial problems. In other words,

Matsumoto’s commitment to help the local landmark exposes how he saw Asakusa

as the most desirable environment in which to showcase his crafted figurines.

This is not unexpected, perhaps, considering his previous tour in Asakusa from

1871 to 1874. In this unprecedentedly popular exhibit, Matsumoto’s subject was

Record of the Miracles of Kannon from the Thirty-three Temples of the Saigoku, which

included thirty-three figurines of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy (figure 10). Thus,

Matsumoto made direct reference to the Senso-ji’s own secret Buddha (hibutsu)

around which the religious efficacy and meaning of the Senso-ji temple was con-

structed.56 Although the secret Buddha served as the main Buddhist object of the

temple, it was never shown to the public. The religious import of Kannon derives

from her ability to transform the moral virtue and conduct of an individual through

her compassion. Matsumoto’s 1878 proposal, four years after this exhibit, was thus

posited both on his previous success and on his conviction that the financial health

and crowd-gathering power of Senso-ji were crucial to his own profession and living.

This symbiosis of two relationships – the first between a person’s own livelihood and

Asakusa, and the second between the health of popular entertainments and the

Senso-ji temple – is not a new development that we see only in Matsumoto or only

in the Meiji period.

Set in this context, the 1881 life-sized photographs of old men at Kitaniwa’s

banquet, with which I opened this article, appear in a new light. Three years after

Matsumoto’s plan to rescue the temple, the idea of transforming the figures of the

old men and representing them as life-sized two-dimensional photographic portraits

posed as Buddhist arhats must have had a visual logic for Kitaniwa similar to the

logic that sustainedMatsumoto’s affinity for Asakusa: Asakusa was a neighbourhood

in which a Buddhist theme would appeal to the masses, and it was also an area that

celebrated the transformative potential of human beings, in both a religious and a

physical sense. Whereas Matsumoto’s ‘living dolls’ shows had offered the experience

of dissonant seeing by transporting viewers into an imagined pilgrimage through

presenting a series of life-like Goddesses of Mercy, Kitaniwa’s adaptation of photo-

graphy remained close to the actual size of a human figure, although his posing the

figures to resemble arhats spoke directly to the local referencing also evinced in

Matsumoto’s case. The dissonance between the photographed figures and an actual

person was imbued with additional visual tension by placing actual garments on the

photographic representations, much as Matsumoto’s living dolls ‘wore’ elaborate

clothes.

In fact, the use of life-sized photographic images of people was not unique to this

banquet. Shimooka Renjo, the premier pioneer of photography in Japan, kept a

photographic figure of himself outside his shop in Asakusa Okuyama beginning in

55 – Yomiuri shinbun (9 April 1878), chokan,

1. A year before Matsumoto’s plan, Yomiuri

reported that some estimated the debt of

Senso-ji to be approximately 15,000 yen. See

Yomiuri shinbun (10March 1877), chokan, 3.

Within five years, donations to the Senso-ji

were reported to have reached 7,000 yen, and

the monks of the temple are described as

‘greatly pleased’. Yomiuri shinbun (5 May

1882), chokan, 1.

56 – After Matsumoto’s Kannon show

ended, this figure, one of the thirty-three in

Matsumoto’s show, known as Tanigumi

Kannonzo, remained in the Denpo-in temple

in Asakusa for nine years, and then was

transported to Jokoku-ji temple in

Kumamoto prefecture, the birthplace of

Matsumoto. It remains in the same temple to

this day. See Tomizawa Hiroko, ‘Nihon no

Ikiningyo soron’, in Ikiningyo to Matsumoto

Kisaburo, ed. and pub. Ikiningyo to

Matsumoto Kisaburo ten jikko iinkai,

Kumamoto 2004, 111; and Naoyuki

Kinoshita, ‘Kisaburo, Kuniyoshi and the

‘‘Living Doll’’ ’, 101.

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1882, five years after Matsumoto announced his new show in Asakusa. Shibuya

Seika, a writer of children’s books, remarked in Asakusakko (People of Asakusa):

[T]here was a house that displayed a life-sized photograph of an old manoutside. The photographed old man had a long beard. Because the photographwas so big that it covered the windows, it caught my attention and I felt strangelooking at it. (The house looked like it used to operate business there, but hadclosed. The space was then used as living quarters. I thought it was a strangehouse.) From time to time, an old man who looked just like the old man in thephotograph came out of the house with a cane. He was thin and tall, and hishouse sign read ‘Shimooka Renjo’.57

Shimooka Renjo was the one of best known photographers in Japan. In the 1877

‘Graded Evaluation of Tokyo Photographers’ examined earlier, he is noted as one of

the referees (gyoji). Since opening studios in Yokohama in 1862, Shimooka had

Figure 10. Matsumoto Kisaburo, Goddess of

Mercy, from Record of the Miracles of Kannon

from the Thirty-three Temples of the Saigoku,

160 cm, wood, with pigment, textile, glass,

horsehair, 1871.

57 – Quoted in Horikiri, Asakusa, 281.

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turned his business into a very lucrative operation.58 He decided to relocate to

Asakusa in 1882, at the age of sixty, after handing down his Yokohama photographic

studios to his son. He had actually exhibited panoramic paintings of two battles,

Hakodate and Taiwan, in Asakusa in the spring of 1876, as a misemono spectacle.59

Even before relocating, therefore, Shimooka understood that Asakusa was a site

where unfamiliar and unusual pictorial representations would and could feed the

popular desire to experience the visual dissonance that media such as panoramic

paintings, oil paintings and photographic prints evoked.

After moving to Asakusa, Shimooka lived in the Asakusa Okuyama area, in the

midst of other photographic studios, and expanded his visual repertoire to include

not only panoramic paintings but painted studio backdrops for local photographic

shops.60 Shimooka’s life-sized photograph of himself at his shop extended and

enriched the playfulness and visual curiosity that were already deeply associated

with Asakusa. By placing a life-sized photograph of himself in his shop window,

Shimooka augmented the transformative potential of pictorial media that permeated

the Asakusa Okuyama area; at the same time, he demonstrated how photographic

studios blended into the area by adapting the historical forms of popular entertain-

ment and feeding the popular expectations for dissonant seeing that together defined

Asakusa.

This synergetic feeding of and off the cultural activities and business tactics that

defined Asakusa both anticipated and accelerated the practices of studio photogra-

phy in the area. The representational transformation of the human body, as evoked

by ‘living dolls’, reverberated with the display of life-sized photographs of the human

figure by Kitaniwa and Shimooka. Ezaki’s photograph of Princess Orihime and Saba

extended the logic of visual transformation even further. The portraits of kabuki

actors and the photographic products such as the hairpins and hand towels that bore

celebrity images, were identifiers and signifiers for the body aimed at accessorising

the customer. The practices of studio photography in Asakusa thus seamlessly took

advantage of and extended the expectations of dissonant seeing that fuelled business

in the Asakusa area in the early years of the Meiji period.

58 – He is said to have earned 350 yen a

month, when 1 sho (about 0.5 gallon) of rice

cost about 0.4 yen. Ozawa, Bakumatsu Meiji

no shashin, 202. Oshima Masahiro’s

historical fiction on the life of Shimooka

Renjo gives a glimpse into how Shimooka’s

obsession with photography unfolded in his

life. Oshima Masahiro, Bakumatsu

shashinshi Shimooka Renjo, Tokyo: Gakuyo

Shobo 1999. Shimooka’s efforts to learn

photography – first from Henry Heusken, a

Dutch national who served as a translator for

an American delegation in 1856, and then

from the American John Wilson in

Yokohama – are well documented both in

Fujikura Tadaaki, Shashin denrai to

Shimooka Renjo, Yokohama: Kanashin

Shuppan 1997; and in Saito Takio,

Bakumatsu Meiji Yokohama shashinkan

monogatari, Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan

2004, 108–44. Shimooka left a somewhat

contradictory account of his life; see Saito

Takio’s short essay on an attempt to calibrate

Shimooka’s own biography: Saito Takio,

‘Hakumyo no jidai no shashinshi Shimooka

Renjo’, in The Advent of Photography in

Japan, exhibition catalogue ed. and pub.

Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of

Photography 1997, 84–8. For a study of

Shimooka’s photographic images, see

Ishiguro Keisho, Renjo Shimooka: The

Pioneer Photographer in Japan, Tokyo:

Shinchosha 1999. Shimooka’s

entrepreneurial spirit was not limited to

representational endeavours. During the

1870s, he invested in establishing a horse–

carriage train system between Yokohama

and Tokyo, which failed.

59 – Kinoshita Naoyuki, Shashin garon,

Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten 1996, 27. Along with

Shimooka’s panorama were oil paintings by

Shiba Kokan, Yokoyama Matsusaburo, and

Goseida Yoshimatsu. The panorama of the

battle of Taiwan is said to have been based on

the textual account of Kishida Ginko, who

travelled to Taiwan as a reporter for Tokyo

nichinichi shinbun. Horikiri, Asakusa, 281.

Shimooka’s panoramic painting is now in

the collection of the Y�ush�ukan museum at

Yasukuni shrine.

60 – Shimooka’s exhibition was not limited

to pictorial works: in January 1878, he

exhibited a model of steam engine train,

about 6metres long, that he had ‘crafted with

innovation and sophistication’ to carry three

adults. A month later, he concocted a

balloon that played music as it floated

upward, and intended to share this device

with the public. See Yomiuri shinbun (6

January 1878), chokan, 3; and Yomiuri

shinbun (17 February 1878), chokan, 1.

Shimooka’s curiosity for the novel and his

innovative approach to the new probably

prompted all his activities including

photography.

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