How Japan Became a Photography Powerhouse: The Beginnings

The FUJIFILM SQUARE Photo History Museum is pleased to present How Japan Became a Photography Powerhouse: The Beginnings, a special exhibition that introduces the early history of photography in Japan through objects held in the collection at FUJIFILM Corporation. Today, we all come across large quantities of photographs on a daily basis, but how did photography arrive in Japan and how did it become so popular? It was through the passion and hard work of our forebears who overcame countless difficulties in the mid- to late 19th century, a time of many social and economic restraints when Western science and technology were still new to Japan. Photography arrived in Japan about 190 years ago. The world's first viable photography technique, the daguerreotype, was introduced in France in 1839 and is thought to have arrived in Japan on board a Dutch ship docking at Nagasaki in 1848. The Western science of photography was unknown in Japan at the time, but the Tokugawa shogunate and other interested domains commissioned scholars of Western learning, including Kawamoto Kōmin (1810–71), to carry out research and experiments. Another decade would pass before the switch to the wet collodion process, in the early 1860s made photography viable in Japan. The first professional photographers acquired the skills from foreign photographers who visited Japan after the country opened its border, or from foreign residents familiar with the techniques. From the end of the 1860s onward, Japanese photography culture flourished, building the foundation for the photography powerhouse of the future. The exhibition introduces the early history of photography in Japan by focusing on works in the FUJIFILM Photo Collection at FUJIFILM Corporation. We have carefully selected approximately 30 items for display, which also include historical photography equipment and valuable documentation related to photography in the mid- to late 19th century held by FUJIFILM Corporation. The exhibition tells the story of how photography arrived in Japan with the help of valuable materials related to photography, such as Japan's oldest extant camera obscura, built in the period from the late 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, and a 19th-century daguerreotype camera. The displays also include the Seimikyoku hikkei handbook on chemistry (1862) by Ueno Hikoma (1838–1904), a pioneer of Japanese photography, and the Shashinkyō zusetsu, the first guide to photography techniques in Japan (translated by Yanagawa Shunsan, 1867–68). We hope you will enjoy learning about the dawn of the culture of photography in Japan and how Japan became a photography powerhouse that has produced a unique and distinctive culture of photography in the modern era unlike any other in the world.