Sites of “Disconnectedness”: The Port City of Yokohama, Souvenir Photography, and its Audience

Mio Wakita, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

In the nineteenth century, photography was a vigorous pioneer at the frontiers of changing society.[1] The pervasiveness of photography during the mid-nineteenth century, even in distant places, was recorded by an anonymous author who declared in a review of an exhibition of commercial stereoscopic photographs: “[A]s […] the camera became more common in Egypt and the Holy Land, the more adventurous photographers turned their steps to more distant and less known countries. Even the jealously-guarded countries of China and Japan cannot shut out the camera.”[2] As the first gateway to remote places, ports formed an inextricably bound relationship with photography during the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially in Asia. An increasing interest in the exotic meant that the commercial potential for photography with its overwhelming realism and visual sensation emerged as a popular means of capturing the ‘Other.’

The souvenir photography industry in Japan was initially established in the mid-nineteenth century by Western photographers at Treaty Ports like Yokohama. There it flourished as an industry that provided seemingly ‘authentic,’ and visually convincing pictures. Catering to a non-Japanese audience, this photographic industry cultivated an alternative image culture to the indigenous photography scene, which had its own distinctive iconographic repertoire and visual languages. These distinct image cultures continued their parallel lives until the decline of the image industry, which was triggered by the fierce price competition against privately produced postcards after the relaxation of postal laws at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The desire for and the gaze in the visualization of the “Other” changed during the course of the history of Japanese souvenir photography. In the case of the souvenir photography industry in the port city of Yokohama, for example, the Japanese-owned photographic studios had by the 1880s supplanted the dominant Western photographers. Aided by transport technologies, the profile of the foreign clientele for this image industry was never monolithic, and it experienced a radical shift through the course of its history, especially after the rise of globetrotter tourism in the early 1870s. As a commercial commodity, souvenir photography needed to respond to its changing circumstances. As both a constructed visual object―not a “transparently ‘authentic’ image”[3] of Japan―and a commercial commodity intended to meet customers’ expectations, souvenir photography was a complex cultural product. It is this which invites us to question how the shifting gaze of the photographer and his audience transformed the visual imagination. At the same time, the nineteenth-century port city of Yokohama held an ambiguous position as both a venue of “connections”―bringing people, goods, and ideas together as well as generating diverse cross-cultural memories―and (almost predestined by its beginning as a Treaty Port city and later actively promoted by diverse factors) as a symbolic and physical space of cultural “disconnectedness” from the rest of Japan. This was realized in a manner that was similar to the relationship between the Shanghai International Settlement and inland China. It is this very aspect that begs us to consider the following complex issues: To what extent was the ambivalent facet of the city embedded in the visual representation of Yokohama? In which ways did the resultant unstable memories and perceptions among audiences with shifting profiles affect image creators? How were the differences in perspective between customers and photographers, that is, between the changing generations of recipients as well as between the photographers active in different phases, negotiated in the image-making processes?

Using the examples of nineteenth-century Yokohama souvenir photography taken by Felice Beato and Kusakabe Kimbei, I aim to investigate how photographic images of Yokohama could be read as mirroring the dynamics of these shifting relationships and perspectives. A particular focus will be on Yokohama as a physical site, on Yokohama as a site of transition, and on the corporeality of the onsite experience of the audience. The dynamics of the port city as a place of disconnections/connections will be at the center of my discussion. In the process, I will delineate the changing associations of the port city of Yokohama as a site of both image creation and consumption, factors which in their turn led to shifting conditions for Yokohama souvenir photography within and beyond the port city. My aim is to specify how these shifting conditions, such as the development of “globetrotter” tourism, shaped the rhetoric of visual representation. In contrast to most discussions of the tourist gaze, in which the main focus is primarily on the techniques of visual representation[4] or the constitution of the gazing subject,[5] this study will highlight the embodied experiences of photography’s audiences, the technological advancements in photographic media and transportation, as well as the changing methods of image acquisition. In this I will build on a suggestion by Mike Crang that corporeality of experience is a key aspect within the photographic representation of tourist landscape because it “serves to highlight the mediation of visual worlds through technologies and epistemologies.”[6] This paper will thus explore the multifaceted and changing aspects of Yokohama photography and its image-making practices in constant dialogue with the changing conditions of the photographers themselves, as well as of the port city, of travel, and of photographic technology.[7]

The souvenir photography industry in Yokohama

After Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1853 and the subsequent end of Japan’s policy of national seclusion, the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed in 1858 with the stipulation that Japan would open five Treaty Ports for foreign commerce and settlement in the following year. Once a sleepy village with no more than eighty to ninety houses (around 400 inhabitants)[8], Yokohama―one of the five Treaty Ports―emerged as the most important of these due to its closeness to the capital city (Fig. 1). By 1867 Yokohama had grown into “the great centre of foreign traffic in Japan […] [due to its] facility of communication from abroad, and […] its position on the seaboard of the central portion of the empire.”[9] By 1864 Yokohama was already handling over eighty percent of Japan&rsquos total exports and was well on its way to becoming the largest and the most frequented of all open port settlements in Japan.[10] The first photographers who were enterprising enough to seek new business opportunities using this Western visual technology in the newly opened Japan were Westerners. Most of them were based in China and some had operated photography studios in Shanghai or in Hong Kong where photography had been practiced for seventeen years before Japan opened her Treaty Ports. This geographical proximity may explain their early appearance in Japan.

Because during their first years these Japanese Treaty Ports were considered frontier towns (Yokohama had only forty foreign residents at the end of 1859, the first year of trade) it took some time before the first photographers established their commercial studios in these areas. Although some Western photographers had already visited Japan, the first significant wave of Western commercial photographers arrived around 1860.[11] Pierre Joseph Rossier, a Swiss commercial photographer who was dispatched from his London agency, took the first commercial photographs of Japan as early as 1859. Orrin Erastus Freeman (1830–1866), an American professional photographer who was based in Shanghai and possibly the first Western photographer to establish a permanent residence in Japan, opened a studio in Yokohama in 1860. William Saunders (1832–1892, active in the early 1860s), a British photographer based in Shanghai, came to Japan in 1862 for several months to expand his portfolio with Japanese sights, especially of Edo and Yokohama. Saunders’s British colleague, Charles Parker, shifted his base from Hong Kong to Yokohama in 1863, where he remained active until 1865. Felice Beato, a Corfu-born British photographer, who was to become one of the most prominent figures in the nineteenth-century souvenir photography industry in Japan, arrived in Yokohama around June 1863.[12] Shimooka Renjō, one of the earliest Japanese professional photographers, opened his first photography studio in Yokohama in 1862; by 1875 it had expanded to three branches in the city. At one of his branch shops on Yokohama&rsquos main avenue (Honcho Street), Renjō had a photography studio on the first floor while the ground floor was designated for the sale of souvenir articles, including one of the most popular souvenir articles for foreign visitors, nishikie woodblock prints. The items for sale in Renjō’s shop illustrate several important aspects of the Yokohama port city culture: The growing importance of photography as a commercial enterprise, and even more significant, the association of photography businesses in Yokohama with the city&rsquos growing souvenir industry.

The coming of the globetrotter

The early customers for Japanese souvenir photographs of Yokohama were primarily foreign residents of the town. They were a diverse community of long-term dwellers that included missionaries, diplomats,[13] merchants, and members of Western military garrisons and naval squadrons who were assigned to Treaty Ports between 1863 and the mid-1870s in reaction to a series of violent attacks on their citizens by locals. The clientele profile of the Yokohama-based photography studios is evident from the advertisements in English-language local newspapers like Japan Weekly and Japan Herald, which targeted the expatriate communities in the Japanese Treaty Ports. The texts of these advertisements are explicit. William Saunders, for instance, announced his arrival to the “community of Yokohama” in an advertisement in Japan Herald (September 20, 1862), the earliest-known advertisement by a studio in Japan.[14] In 1870 the advertisement placed by Felice Beato in Japan Weekly announced his sale of photography albums and was also aimed at the local clientele:

Signor F. Beato, begs to announce to the Public of Yokohama and Travellers visiting the East generally, that he has just completed a handsome collection of Albums of various sizes, containing views &c., of Japan, with descriptions of the Scenes, Manners and Customs of the people; compiled after visiting all the most interesting localities in the country during six years residence. NO. 17 ON THE BUND[15]

The reference to “(t)ravellers visiting the East” in this advertisement alerts us to  the fact that a new group of customers had made its appearance by the early 1870s, the “globetrotter.”  His emergence greatly expanded the tourist market for the Yokohama photographic trade. Globetrotter travelling had been greatly facilitated in 1869 by the shortcut from Europe to Asia that had opened via the Suez Canal and across the United States through the completion of the Trans-American railway. The first scheduled trans-Pacific steamship service by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company traveling from San Francisco via Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki to Hong Kong began in 1867. In 1874 the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company was launched by the Union Pacific and Central Railways to provide a service from the US East Coast to Asia. Furthermore, steamship development drastically shortened the travelling time from Europe and North America to East Asia, while also making travel more comfortable and convenient.

A traveller or business man who, a few years ago, went to San Francisco, Japan, China, or India, or made the circuit of the globe, arranged his affairs with the expectation that at least a year or two of his life was required to make the journey by land and water. To-day he can start from New York or London, transact important business, and enjoy the pleasures of travel, returning to his home, if desired, within the period of three months; during which time he is in communication with the chief centres of business by telegraph and steam poste-routes.[16]

In the 1870s a trip across the Pacific by steamship from San Francisco to Yokohama took twenty-four days; by the mid-1880s it took less than twenty days; and by 1891 it took only ten days to travel between Yokohama and Vancouver, and less than fifteen days from Japan to New York and Boston.[17] Yokohama advanced as one of the key anchorage ports of the international steamship network. By 1895 a liner from the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company called in from Vancouver every two weeks and made further port calls at Kobe, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Twice a month a trans-Atlantic steamship from San Francisco made a stop after calling at Honolulu. The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (known as P & O Company), the Austrian Lloyd’s Steam Navigation Company, and the North German Lloyd also ran regular services from Europe to Yokohama.

Running parallel to the increasing number of travelers to the city was a major shift in the photography market catering to foreigners in both the resident and tourist market. Faced with a startling influx of transient visitors, the term “globetrotter” was coined and used by the local community in order to differentiate these visitors from the expatriate community. William Elliot Griffis mentioned this phenomenon in 1876: “The coming orthodox bridal tour and round-the world-trip will soon be made via Japan first, then Asia, Europe, and America. Already the circum-mundane tourists have become so frequent and temporarily numerous in Yokohama as to be recognized as a distinct class. In the easy language of the port, they are called ‘globe-trotters.’”[18] However, this differentiation was also intended to distinguish the long-time Western residents in Japan: Hinting at the commercial tours that were the preferred mode of globetrotter travel, the term also connotes the diminished quality of their tourist experience and of their cultural and social encounters. Basil Hall Chamberlain went so far as to refer to them as “Globe-trotter locustus the species that travels in swarms, perpetually dragged around the universe by Cook, or the likes of Cook.”[19] Considering that the number of foreign residents in the Yokohama settlement in 1868 was counted at 557[20], this globetrotter tourism with its thousands of international visitors every year emerged as a prosperous new field for Yokohama souvenir photographers.

During the 1880s, many studios sprang up to meet new tourist demands; in 1891 there were ten Japanese photographic studios in Yokohama, but eleven years later, in 1902, the total number had risen to fifteen.[21] The wide dissemination of photographic images from Yokohama is well illustrated in the diary of the Czech globetrotter Josef Kořenský, who visited Japan in 1893:

[Japanese] photographers, whose skill in hand colouring and quick handling are greatly admired by Europeans, are settled either in the Bay area or in the Japanese residential area in Yokohama. […] Yokohama is the best place to purchase photographs of Japanese subjects. The photography studios run by Ogawa, Suzuki, Kimbei, and Tamamura cannot fully cope with the overwhelming amount of orders from foreign tourists. They normally send photographs packed in a metal box to their foreign commissioners after receiving orders.[22]

The growing number of tourists thus motivated enterprising Japanese to seek business opportunities in the photography branch of the flourishing Yokohama tourist industry. This sometimes caused frictions between Western photographers and their assistants: Raimund von Stillfried, an Austrian souvenir photographer who was active in Yokohama in the 1870s, complained bitterly about his difficulties in keeping expertise secure from competition. “At first,” Stillfried stated, “he [Stillfried] used to show his one assistant all the different photographic manipulations necessary to produce a picture, and the consequence was that he soon left and set up on his own account.”[23] Thereafter, Stillfried gave instructions to his Japanese employees in only one particular area of specialization to ensure that no other part of the production process was observed and that his expertise in photography remained exclusive.[24] However, Stillfried&rsquos maneuvers were in vain; they did nothing to stop the Japanese influx into his business domain, and the shift from foreign-owned to Japanese-owned photography shops offering souvenir photography increased after the 1880s. While people of diverse Western nationalities had been instrumental during the early stages of photography in Yokohama, at the height of the industry, between the mid-1880s and the end of the nineteenth century, two of the big three players in the industry (Tamamura, Kimbei, Farsari) were Japanese. [25] The dominance of the foreign-owned photography studios specializing in souvenir photography had come to an end.

Shifting images, disconnected place: Photographs by Beato and Kimbei

The most prolific Western souvenir photographer in Japan during the 1860s and the early 1870s was Felice Beato. He is considered to have set the standard of pictorial motifs from Yokohama in souvenir photography for later generations, and he still enjoys great popularity among collectors of nineteenth-century Japanese photography. Beato’s Japan portfolio was established between 1863 and 1868. A great fire that destroyed two-thirds of Yokohama in 1866 also damaged his studio and resulted in the destruction of some of his stock of negatives.[26] Beato rapidly replenished his portfolio and returned with the album Photographic Views of Japan with Historical and Descriptive Notes, Compiled from Authentic Sources, and Personal Observation during a Residence of Several Years, which comprised “views” (architectural scenes, landscapes, and cityscapes) aswell as “costumes” (genre scenes).[27] Each of the photographs included in Beato’s post-1868 album is accompanied by a letterpress text by James William Murray, a friend of Beato’s who was an assistant commissary general based in Yokohama and a noted author of travel guides on Japan.[28] Photographs were mounted on the recto side of each leaf, and a printed label with an accompanying description was attached on the opposite page. Beato’s position as a canonical figure of souvenir photography in Yokohama is owed to his distinctive use of motifs. These ranged from the introduction of the categories of views and costumes in his album Photographic Views of Japan to the use of the album format, painted backdrops for studio photographs, and hand-coloring.[29] Beato standardized his albums into “complete albums” of one hundred prints or “half-albums” of fifty. The practitioners of the post-Beato generation, including Stillfried, Farsari, and Kimbei, inherited a part of Beato’s studio negatives and continued to print and sell his images for decades. Along with Shimooka Renjō, whose apprentices later formed the mainstay of the second generation of souvenir photographers, Beato is regarded as one of the founders of souvenir photography in Yokohama.[30]

Beato’s Yokohama images depict the major sites of the town including locations within the foreign settlement, panoramic views of Yokohama, and scenic spots in Yokohama and within the Treaty Port boundary. These images comprise scenic places within the settlement as well as the typical excursion routes taken by foreign residents based in Yokohama.[31] For instance, the image of Negishi Bay, the so-called Mississippi Bay, which was described as “the most beautiful for varied scenery in the world […] [and] especially at the sunset and twilight hours […] matchlessly lovely,”[32] depicts the new walking path constructed by the Japanese in 1864 (Fig. 2). Passing along the beach and “through several Japanese villages, past rice and wheat fields, and through a beautiful valley,”[33] this path—known as the “new road”—was popular among foreign residents for leisurely walks, and they often praised the view of the Bay and the idyllic scenery of fishing villages along the coast line below.[34] A large number of teahouses were perched along this “new road,” which was in the 1860s often frequented by soldiers and sailors who were “not always in a very sober condition.”[35] Negishi, Kamakura, and Enoshima are among the other locations frequently visited by foreign residents. These sites were later recommended in A Handbook for travellers in central & northern Japan written by Ernest Satow and A.G.S. Hawes (1884), and remained classic destinations for excursions among foreigners for many years.[36] Kusakabe Kimbei, Beato’s former assistant and one of the most prolific Japanese souvenir photographers of the 1880s and 1890s, also adopted these motifs, which Beato already had included into his repertoire.[37] Popular tourist spots within the treaty boundary of Yokohama, such as Kamakura with its famous bronze Buddha and Enoshima Island, were first captured by Beato’s camera for his customers. These images in turn continued to boost the popularity of these sites among visiting foreigners throughout the nineteenth century (and even to this day), as is evidenced by their regular appearance in foreign-language guidebooks and their inclusion in Kimbei’s portfolio.

However, a closer look at the details of Beato’s souvenir photographs reveals a number of time-specific peculiarities. The selection of venues for landscapes not only shows Beato’s impressively wide range of sites, it also reveals his concern with producing memorable images of sites that held special significance for the primary customers of his early years—namely, the foreign expatriates in Yokohama. These sites include, for example, the race-course near Yokohama settlement (Fig. 3) and depictions of sports like hunting, shooting, and boating. These were only a few of the pastimes enjoyed by the expatriates in Yokohama. Although the Yokohama bay provided a good location for regattas, racing seems to have been the most popular sport in the area. Occasional race-meets were held on the garrison parade ground or on the rifle range until the Japanese government leased farming land near Mississippi Bay to the Games Committee of the Settlement in 1866; however, Kusakabe Kimbei did not include this particular place in his portfolio when he began his own business in the 1880s. Considering the fact that horse-racing was still going strong in the 1880s and was regarded as a highlight of the social life of the Yokohama Settlement, Kimbei&rsquos removal of the race-meeting image from his repertoire is a clear indication that he felt the interests of photography’s consumers were shifting. Similarly, large numbers of scenic venues along the popular excursion routes from Yokohama also disappeared from his repertoire. One such example is Miyagase, a place located 35 miles west of Yokohama, which used to be a popular destination in the 1860s for summer day-trip outings to the mountain areas (Fig. 4).[38] Another example is Atsugi, a post town some 20 miles from Yokohama, which was included on several day-trip itineraries and was popular among foreigners (Fig. 5). Until the early 1870s foreign travel and excursion was limited to the Treaty Ports and their immediate environs. Only diplomats, official employees, and those who could take advantage of diplomatic connections managed to enter the interior. During the 1870s travel restrictions were relaxed. In May 1874 The Regulations on Foreigners Travels Outside the Treaty Ports (Gaikokujin naichi ryokō injun jōrei) were promulgated and the government began issuing special passes to foreign residents and visitors who wanted to travel to the interior.[39] By the 1880s and the 1890s sites like Miyagase and Atsugi had been supplanted by other historic tourist spots outside the treaty boundary that had now become accessible. Tourists abandoned these small mountain villages in favor of more grand and scenic tourist locations like Kyoto and the ruins of Osaka castle, which were recommended in guidebooks.

While adopting Beato’s core images of Yokohama for use as one of his major motifs, Kimbei’s expansion of his Yokohama repertoire in the 1880s is notable in that the new images were primarily key tourist venues. These new topics not only included post-1868 institutions like the Grand Hotel (1870–1923) (Fig. 6), the most prestigious place to stay in the settlement, but also the railway station for steam train service between Yokohama and Shinbashi/Tokyo (Fig. 7), which was built in 1872 and was indispensable as a means of quick transport to the capital city (taking 53 minutes instead of the usual 10 hours on foot). The images in Kimbei’s repertoire of Honchō and Benten Dōri, Yokohama’s main streets and center of globetrotter shopping during the 1880s, are of particular interest, and provide a remarkable contrast to Beato’s earlier 1860s-portfolio where they are notably absent (Fig. 8).[40] Shopping was the chief amusement for tourists in Yokohama.[41] A whole array of stores catering to tourist tastes and targeting Western globetrotters was established. Their wares ranged from embroidery, lacquer ware for interior furnishing, and ivory carving to Western-style dresses for women, porcelains, and oil paintings as well as aquarelles, photographs, and postcards.[42] For many visitors to Japan during the nineteenth century, photography was an irresistible attraction. A retired officer and a Welsh tourist left an account of his tempting encounter with Japanese souvenir photography on arrival at the bustling port of Yokohama: “Passing the studio of Messrs. Stillfield and Anderson [sic], whose photos (as I hurriedly glanced at them) made my mouth water […]”[43] A visit to a photography studio was a significant part of the foreign tourists’ shopping binge and search for exotic ‘curios’. Various images of Benten and Honcho Streets were available at Kimbei studio during its more than thirty years of business operation. Notably, those images showing Honcho Street on sale from the 1890s often include his own photographic studio as a part of the streetscape of Yokohama’s prospering avenue (Fig. 9). In view of this, it is obvious that the primary incentive for creating shots of Benten and Honcho Streets was more than simply offering a memorable collectible for tourists within the context of nineteenth-century Yokohama tourism and the typical behavioral pattern of Western globetrotters. Kimbei studio not only provided a visual reminder to purchasers of their curio hunting in Yokohama, but also to the inextricable liaison between the tourist industry in nineteenth-century Yokohama and the souvenir photography studio itself.

Between fascination and disenchantment: Yokohama in the early age of globetrotter tourism and souvenir photograph

In the mind of both Japanese and non-Japanese, Yokohama had special status as a multi-national space that symbolically embodied the otherness within the country. Nonetheless, the perceptions diverged according to perspective. The rise of the globetrotter as the major group of visitors to Yokohama complicated the non-Japanese view of nineteenth-century Yokohama even more.

As a thriving and energetic trading community, nineteenth-century Yokohama attracted both native and non-native merchant-adventurers. The early long-term foreign residents of Yokohama were ambitious young entrepreneurs afflicted with gold rush fever. Large-scale foreign trading companies set up branches in Yokohama and profited from the flourishing trade in raw silk and tea.[44] The headquarters of the leading Japanese silk traders were located on Benten Street, an area filled with shops selling fur, ivory, exclusive porcelain, and lacquer items for foreign customers, and a venue for luxury-class retail shops catering to the local nouveau riche.[45] Its international flair also attracted affluent Japanese celebrities. The foreign settlement in Yokohama, protected by gates and guardhouses until 1872, was built entirely in a “European” style, and pigeon-English was the business language in Yokohama’s Benten Street, where a pigeon-English signboard was perched over every door.[46] Japan’s first European restaurant run by a Japanese was opened in Yokohama in 1867; this was followed by two others within the next few years, which were frequented by intellectuals and celebrities from Tokyo.[47] As a site where such items could be bought, the port city of Yokohama also appeared to subsist on its “otherness” from the rest of Japan. A Yokohama print by Utagawa Hiroshige III (Fig. 10) depicting a bustling street in Yokohama’s foreign settlement documents the fascination felt by local Japanese. It was not just the distinctive, foreign-style architecture of the street like the Tenshudō (“Temple of the Heavenly Lord” or the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) that was deemed worthy of depiction, the Japanese were also gripped by the casual juxtaposition of foreigners and locals in the same Japanese venue, which was symbolically marked by the familiar view of Mount Fuji.

For the locals, Yokohama―both imagined and experienced―often projected its essentially foreign features. From the end of the 1850s to the early 1870s, during the period immediately after the opening of the Treaty Ports, sensational images of “foreign things in Yokohama” were published as woodblock prints and books targeted at a Japanese audience. The overwhelming popularity of these Yokohama prints, or Yokohama ukiyoe, which sold as many as 250,000 copies between 1859 and 1862,[48] bears witness to the insatiable demand for this inexpensive, traditional news media featuring the latest, topical subjects. These Yokohama ukiyoe were seldom created from first-hand observation and often relied heavily on illustrations from foreign newspapers like the Illustrated London News. These illustrations weremingled with existing visual rhetoric borrowed from mid-eighteenth century Nagasaki-e and other contemporary Yokohama prints, as well as with invented motifs.[49] Claiming the artist’s direct observation as one of his sources, the Yokohama-based artist, Hashimoto Sadahide, underscored the authenticity of the illustrations and texts in his three-volume bestseller Record of Things Seen and Heard at the Open Port of Yokohama (Yokohama kaikō kembun shi, first published in 1862, with an additional three volumes in 1865) (Fig. 11). Interestingly, all the Yokohama prints, including Sadahide’s work, were silent about the more realistic aspects of the encounter with the West. They say nothing, for instance, about the series of bloody conflicts that occurred during the first decade after the opening of the port.[50] Instead they focused largely on the curious “peculiarities” brought by the Westerners to Yokohama―their customs, vessels, commodities, and even their bodies. In effect this visual media helped to tame xenophobic sentiments and acted as de facto "public relations agents for the foreigners,"[51] fuelling Japanese popular imagination of the exotic (Fig. 12). Yokohama was designated as a Treaty Port because it was believed that its physical remoteness to any large village would deter foreigners from making contact with locals; the Yokohama prints reveal how Yokohama was fated to embody this “disconnectedness” from the rest of Japan.

The multiculturalism characteristic of nineteenth-century Yokohama, in turn, caused frustration among visiting globetrotters. Yokohama seemed to them to be a “Lie-European town.”[52] The emerging flux of tourists to the port city promoted the gap between visitors’ expectations of imagined Yokohama as the gateway to Japan and the actual physical, social, cultural entity of Yokohama in reality. It is no surprise that the town quickly became a mere stepping-stone for globetrotters who were on their way to somewhere else. Indeed, Western visitors on tour often had an ambivalent relationship with the city. Disparaged as “gloomy, spiritless, and depressing,”[53] many tourists left Yokohama for Tokyo after only a short stay. After viewing lovely “Fusiyama” on board before anchoring at Yokohama, the first disappointment often began with the first glimpse of the port:

An Englishman arriving in Yokohama, looking at the town from a ship in the bay, will have some difficulty at first in discovering any very novel feature in its appearance. To the left on a hill he sees European houses in abundance; all along the shore are large stone buildings, hotels, store-houses, and clubs such as may be seen in any seaport town at home; and with a score or two of steamers of every kind in the foreground, it is indeed hard to realize that he is face to face with the land of the Mikados.[54]

Henry Adams, a New England intellectual and an influential historian who visited Japan in 1886 as the travel companion of American painter John La Farge, complained that the architecture in Yokohama seemed doll-like.[55] In Japan, travelers were lodged in Western-style hotels like the Grand Hotel at No. 20 in Yokohama’s foreign settlement, which was described as “a thoroughly English Hotel”[56] and was one of the most popular places to stay for merchants and travelers from around the world. The staff line-up was thoroughly cosmopolitan: English or American landlords, French cooks, Japanese servants, a French-speaking Chinese steward, a Portuguese clerk, and a Wallachian night watchman.[57] A Welsh tourist, S.H. Jones-Parry, noted his disappointment in missing the “real” “Japaneseness” in Yokohama: “It seemed very strange to be suddenly surrounded by Japanese, and I could not help feeling sorry that so many had donned our ugly and unbecoming garments; but it was glorious fun being beset by real jinricksha men in real Japanese costume (little of it though there was), and being crushed upon by real jinrickshas, which looked like leggy Bath-chairs.”[58] Likewise, the French art critic and collector Théodore Duret found too much of Europe upon his arrival in Yokohama.[59] And Isabella Stewart Gardner, a philanthropist and wealthy art collector who visited Japan in 1883 during her two year-long round-the-world trip noted that “Yokohama is given over to many foreigners who live here charmingly, but without local atmosphere, and who are here for money-getting.”[60] In the age of the globetrotter, Yokohama remained a vital center for prospering foreign trades, but its significance as a gateway to Japan was increasingly reduced to a short pit-stop for Western tourists who were enroute to the rest of Japan. On its Benten and Honcho Streets, Yokohama―a rectangular slip of land surrounded by the sea on the north, by an extensive swamp on the south, and by a gulf on the west―offered the first opportunity for “curio shopping” and provided the visitor’s first encounter with indigenous people. Still, the city’s Western flair appeared to many a physical extension of the Westerner’s own cultural sphere. In his search for alterity, Duret, for instance, found his encounter with the religious monuments in Tokyo a great relief: “we encountered an absolutely new architecture which owed nothing to the Greek nor to the Gothic. We finally felt that we were in Asia […]”[61] Rather than enjoying an extensive stay in Yokohama, globetrotters commonly embarked on short one-day excursions to Kamakura and Tokyo in search of “Otherness.” In the visiting Westerner’s perception, Yokohama was a space disconnected from the “real” Japan.

The creators of souvenir photographs of Yokohama attempted to address the frustration felt among Westerners about the cultural detachment of the city from what was believed to be typically “Japanese.” Even before the rise of globetrotting tourism, the Benten Dōri, also called “Curio Street,” served this purpose and was much frequented by foreign expatriates during the 1860s; it was introduced to the Japanese audience in a guidebook as one of the exotic spectacles of Yokohama (Fig. 11).[62] Beato and Kimbei also sought to enhance the “otherness” of their visual products so that they could be marketed as images of Japan. However, their approaches were quite different.

In Beato’s photograph of a curio shop the camera focuses primarily on conveying the domestic mode of shop display (Fig. 13). The curio or souvenir shops in the main streets, with their typical display in the shop front of tourist commodities for curio hunters, were among the venues through which Yokohama “reestablished” its “Japaneseness” in the eyes of foreigners. The light effect and the uncovered soil at the shop front in Beato’s Curio Shop reveal that the photograph is an outdoor shot. Considering that an anonymous outdoor photograph of a related motif taken around 1883 shows a similarly dense arrangement of metal works, ceramics, lacquer wares, and household items (Fig. 14), Beato’s version was most probably less staged than Kimbei’s studio work on the same subject 102. Curio Merchant (Fig. 15). In his photograph, Kimbei stages the local type of shop display in his studio; however, he tidies up the mise-on-scène by limiting the quantity and the variety of props and by arranging them in front of the camera to establish an impression of order. The final image presents a stark contrast to the chaotic assemblage captured by Beato: Kimbei’s abandonment of popular curios like porcelain and bronze wares in favor of light-reflecting shining lacquer props under the controlled light condition of a studio enhances the impression of exclusivity and demonstrates his careful attention to making a favorable visual impression. The repeated appearance of meticulously hand-colored bird and flower motifs―ranging from small lacquer wares to bamboo blinds flanking the scene, as well as Japanese fans floating above―underscores Kimbei’s intention to amplify the image’s decorative character. At the same time, this image could also be viewed as a subtle nod to the aesthetic elegance and refinement of his own photography products, which included a lacquered album richly decorated with elaborate inlays of ivory and mother of pearl (Fig. 16).[63] Kimbei was not only one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the photographic business in Yokohama and Tokyo (boasting the best sales record in 1898[64]), he was also possibly the first to introduce lacquered albums to the market, an innovation that became the most prominent feature of souvenir photography of Yokohama in the early 1880s.[65] Kimbei’s highly artificial staging is heightened by the performance of two young boys who, facing each other, assume the roles of cashier and apprentice in the picture. While Beato was more concerned with visual documentation and relied heavily on photography’s evidentiary imaging power, Kimbei’s constructed images clearly reveal an ideological use of the deceptive guise of photographic realism. Kimbei’s personal concern for aestheticized representation was surely motivated by a desire to sell an appealingly “commodified” Yokohama to his foreign customers―a far different approach from Beato decades earlier. This also underpins the changing circumstances of and expectations from souvenir photography. The fleeting encounter between globetrotting customers with Japan and the Japanese, or even the imagined encounter of armchair travelers, almost predetermined the ideological staging of the image, bringing about an additional facet of disconnectedness to Yokohama as a visual commodity.

Disconnected memories

The emergence of the globetrotter as the main target group for Japanese souvenir photography in Yokohama brought dissonant memories to the surface. Beato’s active period as a photographer in Japan from 1863 to circa 1872[66] coincided with tumultuous political changes in Japan, including the opening of the country to the world in 1854, the overthrow of the Tokugawa government, and the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The early 1860s in Japan was a time of extreme xenophobia. There remained a strong anti-foreign sentiment (jōi) both in the Bakufu government and among the Daimyō and samurai throughout the domains, especially in Satsuma on the island of Kyushu, Tosa on the island of Shikoku, Chōshū in the south of Honshu island, and Mito north of the capital city.[67] Both pro-Western Japanese and foreign officials became the targets of this anti-foreign movement, sonnō jōi (“revere the Emperor and expel the barbarian”). A number of Westerners were even murdered. As early as 1856 an assault on the American consul, Townsend Harris, was planned; in 1859 some Russian naval officers were attacked in the street and one of them was murdered. In January 1861, Henry Heusken (1832–1861), the Dutch language interpreter and secretary of the American Consul-General, became the seventh foreigner murdered in eighteen months.[68] Five months later in the same year, rōnin attacked the British Legation in Edo, wounding Laurence Oliphant, the Legation Secretary, and George Morrison, the British Consul from Nagasaki. A year later, there was a further attack on the Legation in Edo, leading to the death of two men from the British guard.[69] In 1862 Richardson, a British merchant from Shanghai, was killed and two others were wounded because they had failed to show proper respect to the daimyo of Satsuma when they crossed paths with his entourage while travelling the Tōkaidō and passing through Namamugi Village near Yokohama. This so-called Namamugi incident escalated into a retaliatory British bombardment of Kagoshima in the following year and also resulted in the dispatch of British and French garrisons to Yokohama to protect the community (stationed from 1863 until 1875). This incident enraged the expatriates in Yokohama―according to the British diplomat Ernest Satow―to the degree that, had British diplomats not intervened, they would have almost certainly lynched Lord Shimazu.[70] Beato’s arrival in Yokohama in 1863 coincided with this series of xenophobic attacks.

As mentioned, Beato first came to Japan in 1863. His photographs of the site where the sensational Richardson affair of August 1862 occurred were released at least one year after the incident (Fig. 17). They highlight the huge impact this event had on the emotional and social state of the Yokohama foreign community.[71] A barricade formed by three Japanese male figures standing on the Tokaido Road, one of them wearing a sword (possibly a samurai charged with watching Beato and his assistants), also hints that the presence of foreigners was only barely tolerated. Such circumstances resulted in foreign residents’ hiring armed guards called betté when going out. The image of the armed man touching his sword evokes the atmosphere of hysteria and horror that prevailed among foreign expatriates in Yokohama during the 1860s. The constant alertness to danger on the part of resident Westerners was still very intense in the 1870s, so much so that few non-Japanese residents ever went far from their houses unarmed. After an attack on two American teachers walking down the street in Tokyo during the early 1870s, William E. Griffis recorded that “a certain consul posted up a notice in a public place (…) authorizing any citizen of his nationality, should any Japanese be seen laying his hand on his sword, ‘to shoot him on the spot.’”[72] The confrontational and non-peripheral position of the inhabitants in Beato’s Japanese landscapes―in contrast to the absence of the locals in the majority of his photographs of China and India―certainly mirrors the real circumstances of his field work and perfectly responds to the lived experience of the foreign expatriates based in Yokohama at that time.[73]

A group of Beato’s outdoor shots of Kamakura were created under the same atmosphere of emotional unrest felt by Beato and the whole expatriate community in Yokohama at that time (Figs. 18 and 19). Ernest Satow described the shock, panic, and fear prevalent among the foreign community in Yokohama as a “horror […] more easily imagined than described.”[74] A set of photographs from Kamakura capture the site where Major George W. Baldwin and Lieutenant Robert N. Bird of the 20th Regiment of Foot, two Englishmen serving in the British garrison in Yokohama, were murdered on October 1864 by Shimizu Seiji as they traveled from Yokohama to Kamakura. Coincidently, according to Charles Wirgman’s own account in The Illustrated London News, Beato and his business partner Wirgman had met the Englishmen for breakfast in Enoshima shortly before they became victims of the anti-Western terrorist attack.[75] As one of the last people to see the victims of anti-foreign zealots alive and having narrowly escaped the same fate, it is extraordinary that Beato found the composure to take the Kamakura images immediately after the attack.[76] These photographs are both personal and commercially minded documents of the incident, but they are oddly deprived of the sense of control over composition that is characteristic of Beato’s photographs. In Beato’s photographs of China and India, the Westerners were typically a central part of the pictures and were often depicted as triumphant figures in the armed forces (Fig. 20); other architectural views were faithful to the nineteenth-century practice of careful staging and contained posing indigenous people and sometimes even Beato himself (Fig. 21).[77] However, the rather rough and scattered composition of the figures in Beato’s Kamakura picture and the spatial relationship within the frame of this photograph are atypical of his oeuvre and less organized than usual. This is perhaps a visual echo of the community’s emotional sensitivity. The confrontational configuration of the group of Japanese on the right facing a few Westerners standing alone seems symbolic of the hostility that might have been felt on site (Fig. 19). The strong eye-witness quality of this photograph is a great contrast to the illustration by Charles Wirgman allegedly depicting the site of the attack, which was published in an issue of The Illustrated London News. Wirgman’s image is astonishingly inattentive to the immediacy of representation and weak in making any convincing visual reference to the brutal incident (Fig. 22).[78]

Fig. 24: Felice Beato, Interior of the Angle of North Fort Immediately after Its Capture, August 21st, 1860, 1860, 22.3 x 30cm, albumen silver print, The J. Paul Getty Museum (Lacoste, Felice Beato, fig. 3).

In this context, a series of punitive images in Beato’s portfolio deserve special attention. After the Kamakura incident of 1864 (the murderer was executed in December the same year) Beato re-staged an execution scene in his studio (Fig. 23). The staged scene captures the moment immediately before the execution. This photograph does not claim to be an authentic re-creation of the Japanese method of execution, but the focal point is placed on the tension between the edge of the executioner’s sword and the neck of the criminal. The blindness and total passivity of the criminal provides a sharp contrast to our informed gaze as onlooker and witness to an (hypothetical) act of capital punishment, and it creates an oppressive tension. The painted image of Mount Fuji on the backdrop dominates the central picture plane, clearly locating—or “localizing”—this scene of cruelty. Beato and his business customers—mostly European and North-American expatriates living in Japan―were highly susceptible to punitive images connected with death. As an image creator, Beato’s professional roots had a marked connection with photography capturing war conflicts. Beato’s first apprenticeship as a photographer was during the Crimean War (1853–1856), the first war ever to be photographed. During the course of his career, he covered an unprecedented number of battles while accompanying the British armed forces, including the Sepoy Rebellion (1857–1858), the Second Opium War in China (1856–1860, see Fig. 24), as well as the American expedition in Korea in 1871, and the Sudanese colonial wars in 1885. His war photographs of the Second Opium War are the first series of photographs to document a military campaign. For the first time the camera enabled non-combatant viewers to become voyeuristic witnesses of war from a safe distance. Given the technical restrictions―long exposures, a bulky large-format camera on a tripod, and the transportation of chemicals necessary to process glass plate negatives immediately after exposure—nineteenth-century war photography was incapable of creating action shots of battle[79]; the camera was necessarily used to capture the aftermath of violent conflicts and gruesome images of morbid corpses left in the battle field. One eyewitness of Beato’s work as a war photographer gave a vivid description of his working circumstances: “I walked round the ramparts on the West side. They were thickly strewn with dead―in the North-West angle thirteen were lying in one group round a gun. Signor Beato was there in great excitement, characterizing the group as “beautiful” and begging that it might not be interfered with until perpetuated by his photographic apparatus, which was done a few minutes afterward.”[80] Beato’s fascination with abject bodies[81] (of the enemy) was the logical result of market demand. The visual sensation provided by the evidentiary capacity of photographic image-making was dramatic to a nineteenth-century audience. “These admirable views,” declared the author of the Journal of the Photographic Society of London, commenting on Beato’s photographs from Lucknow, India, “give us, in fact, the pictorial romance of this terrible war.”[82] An unusual quantity of such images captured by his camera, bear witness to his understanding of the intuitive and commercial power of photos of the grotesque. Beato’s work is filtered through the viewer’s own fascination with the nearness of the violence seized by his camera.

The extent to which the notorious “Wild West” atmosphere of the Yokohama settlement and the semi-normative “culture of punishment”[83] in Treaty Port cities in Japan and China created a wide acceptance of images of cruelty remains uncertain.[84] However, it is clear that the Western fascination with the subject of criminal justice practiced in Japan provided an important backdrop for Beato’s images. Since the late sixteenth century, Western accounts of Japan breathlessly describe Harakiri beheadings and the Japanese mode of crucifixions. Accounts in mid-nineteenth-century writings on Japan were the de facto result of a succession of repetitive quotations from earlier materials and editorializations by the Dutch publications on Japan. Indeed, Westerners had already formed a preconception and particular “taste” for the region even before the opening of Japan in 1859 and before the members of Perry’s mission took the opportunity to ask a series of questions about the Japanese modes of punitive measures at a social event on Perry’s flagship attended by Japanese guests.[85] Supported by these preconditions, the shudder of horror experienced by the whole foreign community in Yokohama and by Beato´s potential customers at the news of the assassination almost certainly fuelled the production of photographic images focusing on these issues.

Seen against this backdrop, Beato’s issuing of photographic albums with explicatory captions in 1868 could be viewed as a first indication of the shifting profile of his audience. It reveals Beato’s concern over the fading of this shared legacy within the community and, in turn, underpins the significance of this semantic framing, which was also felt by the photographer in creating and viewing these images. The descriptive captions provided for each photograph in Beato’s lavish album Photographic Views of Japan, issued after 1868, refreshed the toxic legacy left by the series of xenophobic attacks and guaranteed that the images would be linked to it. In Beato’s post-1868 albums, two photographs relating to the topic, View Near Kamakura Where Major Baldwin and Lieut. Bird were Murdered (Fig. 18) and The Executioner (Fig. 23), were included. Their captions convey the sensational quality of these images, which were intended for an audience that no longer shared the first-hand emotional experience.[86] For instance, the text for The Executioner,[86] one of the lengthiest captions, describes in the first and last sections the method of execution and the executioner’s social conditions. This is a direct indication of its roots in a Western fascination with the modes of punishment in Japan. The middle part of the caption, however, makes reference to the image’s connection to the incident in the photograph, the execution of Shimizu Seiji, the murderer of Major Baldwin and Lieut. Bird. Together with the landscape photograph View Near Kamakura Where Major Baldwin and Lieut. Bird were Murdered, showing the site of Shimizu’s attack, Beato established the meaning of his album images. They aimed at narrowing the growing emotional and social gaps between the photographer and the Western non-resident tourists who increasingly formed the primary audience for souvenir photography from Yokohama.

Around twenty years later, Kusakabe Kimbei seemed to have no reason to include the sites of past xenophobic attacks in his work. Landscapes featuring these sites disappeared altogether from his portfolio, despite the fact that globetrotters commonly undertook a day-trip from Yokohama to Kamakura and that Kimbei’s portfolio featured as many as twenty Kamakura-related landscapes.[88] In turn, the images of cruelty and of Japanese punishment emancipated themselves from the historically charged context of interaction between Japanese and Westerners in Yokohama. Instead, they were established as a historically decontextualized, and disembodied standard subject in Japanese souvenir photography, a subject topic that is still often discussed in major nineteenth-century publications on Japan.[89] In the 1880s and the 1890s the viewer of this kind of image (Fig. 25) had changed. By this time Kimbei’s customers were mostly Western globetrotters who no longer experienced the violence that had shadowed the lives of resident foreigners based in Japan during the 1860s. Since crucifixion was abolished by the Meiji government soon after the Restoration, it is likely that Kimbei inherited Beato’s shot capturing the public display of a real execution and continued to sell it without any accompanying commentary text for historical contextualization.[90] Although it had once acted as a vivid visual reminder of the hostility and risk of life experienced by expatriates in Yokohama, this image subject was now transformed into a popular-anthropological visual sample, parading a Japanese mode of capital punishment that no longer conformed to the government’s modernization agenda. Kimbei’s original photographs contained staged harakiri scenes that were entirely played out in his photography studio. These images were inaccurately staged and featured actors playing the roles of retrospective samurai figures. They were fully devoid of any direct association with particular anecdotes and by this time had become merely symbolic images of the disconnected memories of Yokohama (Figs. 26 and 27). The recent flood of publications by authorities, including “foreign employees” like William E. Griffis and Basil H. Chamberlain, who were equipped with the language skills, personal experience, and contacts with educated Japanese, as well as travel accounts on Japan written by Western globetrotters, made the lengthy descriptions that had once accompanied Beato’s photographs redundant. This change reflects more than merely the attention to visual primacy that has been attributed to Kimbei. It also facilitated the viewers’ own reading and represents a detachment from the earlier practice of pre-conceived semantic designation that was popular during Beato’s active period.

The virtual tour and the emergence of the tourist gaze

The irreversible trend of the increasing detachment of souvenir photography from its customers’ experience was further accelerated by the circumstances around the purchase of such photographs in Yokohama and the technical advances of photography. Souvenir photography had long formed an integral part of the tourism industry. Customers would walk into a souvenir photography studio in Yokohama and browse the studio’s portfolio before placing orders of selected works and having them bound into a single deluxe volume. While a study of Kusakabe Kimbei’s photography albums indicates the possibility of a sample set of photography at the studio from which customers could have selected from more than 2,000 works, souvenir photography albums sold in Yokohama were most likely to be custom-made.[91] What is still more striking in relation to purchase behavior is that it did not seem to be uncommon for tourists to stop at a photography studio immediately after their arrival in order to select photographs of locations they had not yet seen. For example, a New York doctor who landed in Yokohama in July 1881 went to a photographer and a bookseller directly after checking into his rooms at the Grand Hotel.[92] Indeed, Douglas Sladen recommended that readers of his travel guide Club Hotel Guide to Japan (1892) begin their visit with a stop at a photography studio.[93] Placing an order for a photography album upon arrival in Japan meant that the album would be completed by the time the visitors had finished their tour and were ready to leave for their next destination. In Kusakabe Kimbei’s photographic studio, sales catalogs were issued, presumably in 1893, for free distribution.[94] Customers arriving in a port city probably picked out the numbers of photographs they wanted to order before they embarked on their actual travels in Japan. This method of ordering souvenir photography practiced by nineteenth-century globe-trotting tourists highlights the fading authority of first-hand experience, which had formed the central role in souvenir photography from Yokohama until the popularization of the world-touring tourism in the 1870s. Instead, the discourses on Japan were mediated by wide-ranging publications—tourist guides, tourists accounts, and “authoritative” books on Japan—which emerged as the preeminent agents in determining the venues worth visiting, in selecting the photographs worth collecting, and in directing the reading of photographic images.[95] Here we can clearly locate the emergence of tourist gaze within Yokohama souvenir photography: nineteenth-century discourses constructed Japan as a cultural, imaginative other, and pre-shaped the mind for visual consumption of souvenir photographic images.

The emergence of the amateur photographer among globetrotters further complicates the shifting agencies of Yokohama souvenir photography. The invention of Kodak #1 in 1888 transformed photography from a technically demanding and messy practice to a more accessible one. During Beato’s active period the wet collodion process was in use. In this complicated process, the glass plate, treated with chemicals immediately before use in a darkroom, was still wet during its exposure in a camera. While this process made the advent of commercial photography possible by virtue of its ability to produce a negative image on a transparent photographic medium, it also entailed many logistic and technical difficulties. After 1883 the pre-sensitized gelatin dry plate process was implemented in Japan.[96] A radical reduction in exposure time and its relatively easy use simplified the whole process, and yet this advanced process still required special skills. Thus, the development of the cheap Kodak camera, a simple lightweight box camera loaded with a 100/exposure roll of film, presented a great technical leap.

As a result of this important milestone in photographic technologies, Kodak cameras were already common among European tourists in Egypt as early as 1890.[97] The subsequent advent of the amateur photographer had a significant impact on the souvenir photography industry in Yokohama. Meiklejohn’s Japan Directory of 1892 contains advertising by Cocking & Co. in Yokohama announcing that they stocked Kodak cameras, films, and further photographic materials for amateur photographers on globetrotting tour.[98] A significant indication of their emergence is Adolfo Farsari’s estimate in 1889 that about one half of the visitors to Yokohama were amateur photographers.[99] These changing circumstances forced Yokohama-based souvenir photography studios to initiate new strategies. For instance, Adolfo Farsari & Co. in Yokohama offered the free usage of its darkroom for amateur photographers:

Notice to Amateur Photographers. We have a dark room free of charge at the disposal of amateur photographers. Developing negatives taken by amateurs on plates or film, and printing promptly done at moderate prices. […] A. Farsari & Co., No. 16, Bund.[100]

Furthermore, the Kodak phenomenon initiated a crucial turning point and triggered a distinctive shift from the expatriate’s informed gaze to the globetrotting tourist’s gaze as a crucial agent in shaping nineteenth-century souvenir photography in Yokohama.

Analogous to this Kodak effect on the image industry in nineteenth-century Yokohama was the fact that eighty percent of the total amount of tax paid by one of the Yokohama-based leading souvenir photography studios in 1898 was on sales of photographic supplies.[101] Kimbei’s expansions of his commercial goods to include silk photo fans and “photographic jewelleries” after 1900―ranging from gold photo buttons, photo scarf pins, photo cuff buttons, photo lockets and charms―as well as his manufacturing of metal fittings and accessories for camera by the mid-1900s was a necessary reaction to market transformations.[102] The primacy of discourses over physical experiences for the reception of Yokohama souvenir photography in the age of globetrotter tourism was underpinned by the growing economic impact of its export. Some evidence indicates that from the mid-1880s the sales of Yokohama souvenir photographs through overseas mail orders from private and business customers came into practice.[103] The volume of exports increased continuously after around 1886 and reached its peak around 1897.[104] Prints and photography albums were stocked by Western dealers and sold to people who had never even visited Japan. Souvenir photographs from Yokohama were one of the booming export items during the mid- and late Meiji period: the export value of souvenir photographs in the year 1896 alone amounted to 24,923 Japanese Yen in total (24,077 Yen from the port of Yokohama; 693 Yen from Kobe; and 114 Yen from Nagasaki), which corresponds to around 63,730 colored photographs (at 29 cent a piece) or 87,650 un-tinted photographs (at 15 cent a piece).[105] Around ninety-six percent of the total export volume was shipped from Yokohama.[106] One emblematic instance of this vanishing physical experience in late Yokohama souvenir photography took place in 1896: The Mainichi Shinbun (dated July 19, 1896), a Japanese daily newspaper, reported that the Tamamura studio in Yokohama received an order from the J.B. Millet Company in Boston for one million photographs of landscapes and people of Japan.[107] These original albumen prints were to be used in a multivolume publication entitled Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese published between 1897 and 1898 in sixteen different editions. Souvenir photographs of Yokohama-based Japanese studios were (most were identical to ones available for sale at their studios on site) mass-reproduced to cater to foreign armchair travelers. Notably, this ambitious venture of producing selective pictures of Japan received generous financial support from the Japanese government and thus assumed the role of a semiofficial photography designated to market Japan. Here we witness a further rupture within which the lived experience—or ‘the real’—lost agency, and the gaze of the cultural self became involved in shaping the “imaginative geography“ of Japan.

A site of “disconnectedness”

Globetrotter tourism heralded a disentanglement from the lived experiences that had once formed a strong incentive to create specific souvenir photographs; the emergence of a substantial export market for Japanese souvenir photography and the transfiguration of souvenir photography to “Kodaking” tourist photography after the late 1880s promoted both the virtual globetrotting of armchair travelers and the tourist gaze as a powerful agent of image-making practices. The growing disembodiment of travel and experience as well as the “kodakisation” of place by the tourist gaze, informed by clichés and popular discourses, were the phenomenon of the post-Beato era of Yokohama souvenir photography. They represent a radical breach with the intrinsic interrelatedness of Beato’s photographs, his audience, and the physical place of Yokohama.

In a general discussion on photography and tourism, the modern tourist gaze―looking upon the world through ethnocentric filters to create imaginative geographies―appeared around 1840, when the means of collective travel and the photographic technology of image making became available and established new patterns of gaze.[108] As this article has shown, this concept of the modern tourist gaze might be too generalized. For instance, it does not address the multifaceted and often complex relationships between tourists’ mobility and their proximity to the “real” at the early, transitory stages of modern tourism, as seen in the case of souvenir photography from Yokohama. The detailed analysis of technological advancements in the image-making device and its link to the shifting means of tourist access to photographic images also reveals a much more complex picture, which contained many layers of transformative process affecting the relationship between port city, souvenir photography, and audience.

My discussion of Yokohama souvenir photography demonstrates that the nineteenth-century port city of Yokohama as well as nineteenth-century souvenir photography from Yokohama were marked by “disconnectedness” on several levels, both in factual and metaphorical terms. Because of the status of the settlement after treaty limits were imposed during the 1860s, and because of its transcultural circumstances as the major gateway for foreign influence in Japan, Yokohama was perceived as being culturally detached from the “real Japan” by foreign residents, travelling Westerners, and by Japanese locals. The rise in globetrotter tourism in the 1870s increasingly shaped Yokohama as a site of “transitions.” With a growing number of short-term Western visitors, the collective memories previously shared by the long-term dwellers of the foreign settlement also broke apart. There was a major disparity between photographers as entrepreneurs (vital) and their audiences (neutral-irrelevant) in the perceived significance of Yokohama. This phenomenon of “disconnectedness” turns out to have been the extreme antithesis to the increasing “connectedness” between Japan and the rest of the world, which had been fostered at the same time by better transport technologies. Souvenir photography from Yokohama was used to connect the shared memory of foreign expatriates in Yokohama, including that of its image creator. Souvenir photography later documented how the shifting profile of its audiences subsumed resident knowledge and their lived experiences into a general cataloguing of the “Other.” Reflecting the shifting conditions both in Yokohama and within the souvenir photography industry, souvenir photography images reveal themselves to be witnesses of these disparities and of the discrepancies in physical “connectedness” that were taking place in the port city of Yokohama and within its visual practices during the second half of the nineteenth century.