Noguchi Gennosuke’s Photography:
Photographing the Lifeways of the Ainu in Early Modern Japan
Ohtsuka Kazuyoshi
Professor Emeritus, National Museum of Ethnology

Introduction

In 1871, when the Imperial Navy vessel Kasuga engaged in a national project to make highly accurate hydrographic
maps of the coast of Hokkaido, they enlisted help from the British Navy. Noguchi Gennosuke, an officer from
Kanagawa Prefecture, was dispatched as an interpreter and boarded the British ship, the HMS Sylvia. He is thought
to have served as a photographer as well as an interpreter during the survey. Today, however, his contributions, withreference to photographic material, are almost unknown.
The Esso Album, which is introduced in this exhibition, was acquired by the author at an antique book sale in
Kanda, Tokyo, in early 1990. A title strip of distinctively decorative marbled paper is pasted on the cover, withthe words “Esso Album” written on it in pen and ink. The album consists of forty albumin prints; eighteen of thephotographs are about the size of a postcard, while the remaining twenty-two are business-card size. The album ismade of plain sheets of Western-style paper, folded in half and joined together. The larger photographs are mounted
one per page, the smaller ones mounted two in a row, top and bottom (five pages), with a large one and a small one
on the last page, top and bottom. The four corners of each photograph are inserted into notches that had been madein the base paper. The Esso Album contains no explanatory text and no signature. After purchasing it, I searched foralbumin prints from the same period, but I never found the same images and could not find any clue as to who thephotographer was or when and where the photographs were taken.
In 1998, the book, Charles Appleton Long fellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 1871-1873, was published and it included
five photographs that are also in the Esso Album; it was explained that the photographer may have been “Mr.
Noguootchi” [Noguchi].1
Furthermore, in 1999, in the catalogue from the special exhibition titled Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People that washeld at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institute, I found two photographs from theLongfellow House Collection taken by G. Noguchi in 1871: Japanese Ezo Fishery and Young Girl Wearing Necklace. The
Esso Album contains these same 2 photographs.2
In 2004, a Japanese translation of Twenty Months in Japan was published (translated by Yamada Kumiko). In the
appendix, it includes Longfellow’s entire collection of photographs of the Ainu with a commentary by SebastianDobson, a researcher of early photographs.3 Longfellow’s album has “G. Nogootch Yezo Album 蝦 夷 畫 ” written
in pen and ink on the cover and each of the twenty-one photographs has an explanation underneath written in
cursive. Dobson assumes that the texts were written by Noguchi, based on their grammatical and wording errors; healso assumes the photographer was Swinton Holland, a lieutenant in the British navy who had brought his camera
equipment with him when he sailed on the HMS Sylvia. I personally asked Dobson to examine whether the person
who wrote “Esso Album” on the cover of the album that I have, and “Yezo Album” on the cover of Longfellow’s
album were one and the same. He concluded that they were.
However, it was Kato Masaru’s Burakisuton “hyohon” shi [A history of bird specimens collected by Thomas

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Wright Blakiston], published in 2012, that provided sufficient evidence to confirm that G. Nogootch, G. Noguchi,
and Noguchi were all Noguchi Gennosuke4. Kato’s detailed study of various records made it clear that Noguchi
Gennosuke had been active as a “natural history” translator and interpreter, who had translated such books as
Blakiston’s collection and Pryer’s Catalogue of the Birds of Japan (1880) into Japanese. In 1871, Noguchi disembarked
from the Sylvia and returned to work in Kanagawa Prefecture. In 1873, he worked for the Hokkaido Development
Commission as a “translator, interpreter, and photographer.” He apparently was working at the commission’s Tokyo
bureau, which was its central unit.
It is likely that Noguchi met Charles Appleton Longfellow while he was working in Kanagawa Prefecture andlater for the Development Commission, and gave him the Yezo Album. And it is easy to imagine Longfellow asking
for Noguchi’s photographs as mementos of his trip to Hokkaido, which he took immediately after arriving in Japan.
Gennosuke as a “Photographic Technician”

Noguchi Gennosuke was born in Nagasaki in 1844 and became an interpreter for the Kanagawa Court in 1868.
He was active as an English interpreter at the very beginning of Japan’s modernization. Making use of his linguistic
abilities, he interacted with people in high-ranking positions as well as researchers from Europe and America.
While providing important assistance by translating English documents, he also made major contributions to thedevelopment of the natural sciences at the dawn of modern Japan. In addition, he also focused on mastering phototechnology.
Gennosuke’s transition to a “photo technician” may have occurred while he was working on the government
project to survey the coast of Hokkaido, with the British. The new Meiji-Restoration Government was rushing toacquire large warships, and urgently needed to prepare accurate hydrographic maps necessary for their navigation.
The government regarded the Japanese survey vessel, the Kasuga, as insufficient for that task, since it did not haveadvanced surveying equipment or the expertise in using it, thus they requested the British Navy to offer a survey
vessel and advice on surveying techniques, equipment, and how to operate the equipment. Britain assigned thesurvey vessel the HMS Sylvia, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Craven St. John, to join the JapaneseImperial Navy’s Kasuga, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Yanagi Narayoshi. It was Noguchi Gennosuke who
was ordered to serve as an interpreter for both ships.
Navy Captain Swinton Holland, serving on the HMS Sylvia, had brought his own full set of photographic
equipment on board. Noguchi observed and assisted Holland and began to learn photo technology. As a result,
Noguchi himself succeeded in producing a valuable photographic record from around the coastal periphery of
Hokkaido in the early Meiji period.
Photography was hard work. Given the capabilities of the camera at that time, it took five seconds or more tocapture an image on the photographic paper. The subject had to hold still for a long time, so the photographer had tobe sure they understood that before shooting. It must have been Noguchi who explained this to the Ainu people andasked them to pose as Holland, or another photographer, requested. Dobson discovered a note written by Holland,
which said Holland himself was inexperienced as a photographer and had failed while photographing in SouthAmerica, but had succeeded in Hokkaido.5 It is likely that Noguchi, with his strong interest in science, was stimulatedby the cooperative relationship he had with Holland, as he worked towards his own success as a photographer.
Kato Masaru assumed that Noguchi had mastered the technology of photography before being assigned to theSylvia.6 But I believe he learned and mastered the process while he was working with Holland, setting up scenes,
negotiating to get the cooperation of the Ainu, and preparing the photo paper and materials at the shooting sites.
There is no documentary evidence that Noguchi
had owned photographic equipment or been able touse it before his time on the Sylvia. But in the Kasuga
Journey, the journal written by Yanagi Narayoshi, thecommander of the Kasuga during the survey to make thehydrographic maps, he states, “On the eighth day of the
fourth month, the heavy ice here broke up and turned
into clusters of floating icebergs and were beginning tocondense again, but the ship broke through the ice andwe landed on shore. As the Sylvia sailed through the ice,
I ordered Noguchi to take photographs to document thedistinctive scenery at different longitudes and latitudes.”Photographs marked from that same date actually exist.7 This photograph is thought to present the HMS Sylvia proceeding through seas
crowded with ice floes. Yanagi Narayoshi states in his Kasuga Journey that heordered Noguchi to take it.

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The Significance of Noguchi Gennosuke’s Esso Album

The order of the photographs in the Esso Album does not follow the route of the Kasuga and the Sylvia. If we try toorganize them following the sequence described in the Kasuga Journey, while referring to the commentaries in the
Yezo Album, three landscape photographs of Hakodate would come first. The photographs were taken from flat landat the seashore and show a full view of Mt. Hakodate, the townscape, and the many ships in the harbor. They areamong the oldest photographs from the early Meiji period for which the name of the photographer and the date areclear. They seem to follow the compositions of landscape paintings and polychrome prints depicting Hakodate during
the last years of the Edo period.
These photographs of Hakodate are followed by photographs of Etomo, Muroran, Akkeshi, Nemuro, Shibetsu,
unidentified sites of Nemuro Strait from the Hokkaido side as well as photographs of an Ainu village near Otaru
on the west coast of Hokkaido. As stated before, there is no commentary of when or where these photographs weretaken or what was being photographed. I would like to point out that it is quite likely that this album was Noguchi
Gennosuke’s personal photography notebook; he remembered the date, place, and contents of the photographs
without bothering to write down that information.
The Significance Today of Noguchi’s Photographs

Noguchi Gennosuke was highly regarded for his English abilities and worked hard as an interpreter on the British
and Japanese naval vessels during the survey of the Hokkaido coastline in order to make the hydrographic maps.
At the same time, he learned the technology of photography from Holland, who was serving on the British ship.
Noguchi seems to have been particularly interested in the everyday scenes of life among the Ainu. In fact, he clearly
saw the Ainu from the point of view of being equal to himself while taking these forty photographs of their life, andtheir chise or dwellings: pictures full of people and beautiful materials. It is difficult to determine whether it was his
own choice to take these photographs or he was directed by Yanagi Narayoshi, the commander of the Kasuga, or by
the Captain of the Sylvia. Yanagi’s journal indicates that he directed Noguchi to take some photographs, but it may
have been Noguchi’s own choice to concentrate on photographing the Ainu. Whichever it was, he was capable ofoperating the photographic equipment by himself.
We can grasp from the atmosphere of his photographs that he was viewing the Ainu in their natural state. They
are very different from later day picture postcards of the Ainu that were produced for tourists and were populararound the 1890s and 1900s, in which the scenes were artificially staged and different from the Ainu’s actual life
style. The vivid images of people’s lives that Noguchi captured in Akkeshi, Nemuro, Notsuke, Shibetsu, and Otaru
are particularly important. For example, his photographs of the shoreline of Akkeshi capture scenes of processing
hoshika, dried fish, which was the most effective fertilizer then available. Hoshika is a boiled, compressed mix of driedsardines, herring and other fish and was used as fertilizer for growing cotton and other crops in Honshu, Japan’s
main island. Many Ainu were employed at these hoshika processing sites and were incorporated into Wajin (people
from mainland Japan) society. Moreover, his photographs of Ainu blending into the scenes in which lots of fish are
lined up and being dried in front of the houses, capture their actual way of life at the time and provides us with areal sense of how they lived. Perhaps, because the main purpose of these photographs was for making hydrographic
maps, we see no images of the harbors, the Wajin settlers, or their dwellings. To some extent, there must have beena certain amount of self-regulation; any subject of military significance seems to have been avoided. In any case, theimportance of Noguchi’s photographs is that they are Japan’s oldest collection of pictures focusing on Ainu live styleand customs. Leaving us this substantial record of forty photographs is Noguchi’s great achievement.
In the 1880s, the administration of Hokkaido was reorganized, and in 1886 the Development Commission was
replaced by the Hokkaido Agency. A period of major change followed, with the introduction of agricultural land
management of vast farmlands using modern farming technology, along with the development of mining. Hokkaido
entered a period of massive change, providing major support for Japan’s entrance into a nationally operated capitalist
system. In the process, the living area of the Ainu, their land and resources were all nationalized, their traditional
culture was rapidly transformed through migration (relocation) along with an ‘agriculturalization’ policy (‘Let the Ainu
become farmers.’). Their lives became impoverished. As a side effect of all of this, tourism in search of the ‘primitive’
way of life of the Ainu in Hokkaido surged, and images of the Ainu that were staged for spectacles at tourist sites
became fixed through picture postcards and other media. A biased view of the Ainu as “living a primitive way of life
even today” was formed and amplified broadly throughout Japanese society. Within this situation, in which prejudice
and discrimination against the Ainu became widespread and continues up to today, The National Ainu Museum wasrecently opened. In considering the ethnic harmony that the museum has set as its mission, greater attention should be
paid from now on to the Esso Album, as fundamental visual material. In the future, by reading these photographs fromvarious research fields, extremely important scholarly information will surely be discovered from them.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Amanda and Kobayashi Masayoshi for their cooperation in writing the English text.

1
2
3

4
5
6
7

4

Christine Wallace Laidlaw, ed., Charles Appleton Long fellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 1871-1873, (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Friend of the Longfellow House, 1998.)
William W. Fitzhugh and Chisato O. Dubreuil, ed., AINU: Spirit of a Northern People (Washington, D.C.: Arctic Studies Center,
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, in association with University of Washington Press, 1999).
Sebastian Dobson, Commentary on Appendix 5, Longfellow’s photographs of the Ainu, in Longuferoo Nihon taizaiki Meiji shonen,
Amerika seinen no mita Nippon, the Japanese translation, by Yamada Kumiko, of Charles Appleton Long fellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 18711873. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2004), pp. 273-87.
Kato Masaru, Burakisuton “hyohon” shi [History of bird specimens collected by Thomas Wright Blakiston]. (Sapporo: Hokkaido
University Press, 2012).
Dobson, p. 281.
Dobson, p. 239.
1970 Yanagi Narayoshi, “Kasuga kikō [Kasuga journey],” Atarashii Dōshi [A new history of Hokkaido], no. 41, (Sapporo:
Hokkaido Government, 1970), p. 23.

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Ohtsuka Kazuyoshi

Photographic Techniques in Bakumatsu and Early Meiji Used to
Photograph Hakodate: Genesis of Photography in Japan
Takahashi Norihide
Project Professor, Nihon University College of Art

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum opened in 1990, one year after the hundred and fiftieth anniversary, in 1989,of the announcement of the daguerreotype, the first practical photographic technology. That notable year was filled,
throughout the world, with events and large-scale exhibitions celebrating the invention of photography.
In the three decades since then, the technology underpinning photography has changed significantly. From theend of the twentieth century, imaging techniques using digital electronics have been advancing substantially. In thetwenty-first century, the dominant technology in photography has swiftly changed from silver halide film to digital
photography. In recent years, photographing with cell phones has become mainstream, and the photograph has
acquired a new function as a communication tool, while actually printing photographs as images on a photosensitive
material has become rare. Today, when the materiality of the photograph, a material quality that has long beensustained, has diminished greatly, we should explore what the photograph, which played a significant role as a recordand an art form, was. What was the technology that created it? To understand, it is important to be aware of thephotograph as a thing, as a physical object.

The Photograph as Thing, Thanks to Silver

The daguerreotype, which Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), of France, presented to the world in 1839, isalso called, in Japan, a ginban shashin, silver-plate photograph. That term was devised because the image is fixed anddirectly viewed on a mirror-like silver plate. In fact, silver is the fundamental material in photography.
In the early nineteenth century, photographic technologies were invented using the photosensitive qualities ofsilver compounds (silver halide or silver salt). Since then, the technologies have changed and advanced in many
ways. Yet until the rise of digital photography, what supported the recording capabilities of photography was silver
compounds.
A photograph comes about through the photographer’s sharing time and space with his or her subject.
Photosensitive plates using silver salt, in a setting in which the photographer and the subject were both present,
generated photographic images through the changes made in them by the light at that place. The resulting
photographs have been transmitted as physical objects. The type of photographic technology that best indicates thenature of that type of photograph is the daguerreotype. Amidst the historic events occurring as Japan was at the cusp
1of entering the modern age, three extant daguerreotypes, including Endo Matazaemon and His Retainers at Hakodate,
are valuable as the first photographs of Japanese persons in Japan.

The Wet-Collodion Process and the Albumen Print

The daguerreotype never, however, came into practical use in Japan. The first practical photographic technology
actually used in Japan was the wet-collodion process, which was invented in 1851 by Englishman Fredrick Scott

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Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Takahashi NorihideArcher (1813-57). This photographic process used a glass plate, producing a negative from which a print could be
made. A popular variant was the ambrotype, in which, instead of printing from the negative, the glass negative isviewed directly against a dark background.
In the wet-collodion process, the photographer would prepare the photosensitive plate himself, immediately before
shooting. He would have to take the photograph while the chemicals on the plate were still wet and then develop it
immediately. That meant that a darkroom and a variety of chemicals and other materials had to be available at theplace where the photography was being conducted. Also, the exposure time required ranged from several seconds
to several tens of seconds, depending on the conditions. Needless to say, photographing at night or indoors was
extremely difficult.
Books explaining these techniques and the chemicals used were translated into Japanese in the Bakumatsu period(c. 1850-1868). Examples include the Seimikyoku Hikkei (Chemist’s Handbook), translated by Ueno Hikoma (1838-1904)
in 1862 and the Shashinkyo Zusetsu ( Illustrated Explanation of Photography) translated by Yanagawa Shunsan (183270). While those books provided basic information, the methods for photography being improved by the additionof individual photographers’ own technqiues, which were being transmitted from master to apprentice as secretknowledge.
In Hokkaido, Kizu Kokichi (1830-95) and Tamoto Kenzo (1831-1912), who were the earliest to open photography
studios there, learned the techniques of photography from Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich (1814-75), the Russian
consul, and a Dr. Zalesskii, who served at the hospital attached to the Russian consulate in Hakodate. To operate
as a professional photographer meant studying the techniques, learning how to prepare the collodion plate and thedeveloping solution, and working out the procedures to be followed. Ida Kokichi (1846-1911) and Takebayashi Seiichi(1842-1908), who both studied with Tamoto, and others in their network carried on those techniques and processes.
The details, including whether there were techniques unique to Hakodate photographers, remain largely unknown atpresent, as is also true of early photographers in other regions.
What became the standard printing paper used with the wet-plate negatives was albumen paper, introduced in1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (1802-72) of France. Albumen paper, which is coated with egg white before
being sensitized, can print an extremely broad range of exposures. It was able to print the images captured with theglass negatives of the wet-collodion process, with its broad range of density, producing photographs rich in gradations
and details.
Albumen paper is a printing-out paper, paper that produces a visible image on exposure to light. Since it has
a low sensitivity, the process by which the image appears is slow. It is basically a contact print. Since the print size
will match the negative size, using albumen paper requires a negative the same size as the desired print. Many
photographers at the time used 25.4 x 30.5 centimeter (10 x 12 inch) photographs, but they also created their own
even larger glass negatives that. This exhibition includes one 25.4 x 30.5 centimeter wet-plate collodion negative, Viewof the City of Hakodate, from 1882. Please try to imagine how big the camera used to take it must have been.
This contact print technique was the standard process for a considerable time, even after the gelatin dry plate
negative and gelatin silver print, modern photo-sensitive materials, became available.
While wet-plate photography could be described as an extremely primitive technique, it was also able to record anamazing volume of information. That is because the collodion layer is extremely thin and the particles of the metallic
silver image were extremely fine. Since its sensitivity to color was restricted to short-wave blue light, it did not sense
long-wave light; as a result, the effect of the lens’s chromatic aberration was small.
Photographs printed out on albumin paper contain somewhat less information than the wet-plate negative, but dorecord most of that information, presenting details of the subject. With photographs from this period, it is necessary
to look closely and observe the details. Thanks to the superb recording capabilities of these photographs, images of
the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods have been handed down to us.
The Modern Gelatin Dry-Plate Negative and Printing Paper

From the end of the nineteenth century, the modern dry-plate negative, using a highly sensitive gelatin emulsion,
replaced the wet plate. That new material was invented by Richard Leach Maddox (1816-1902) of Britain in 1871. By
the 1880s, factory-produced dry plates were in general use.
The dry plate was introduced into Japan from the 1880s. They are easy to use, highly sensitive, and do not require
darkroom processes to be carried out at the location of the shooting. This epoch-making technique dramaticallyincreased the scope of photographers’ activities and their expressive range.
The papers for printing photographs also changed. Instead of albumen paper, printing-out papers with a gelatinor collodion emulsion were used. These papers were also factory produced. They were imported to Japan in the late
1880s, and soon were produced here as well. These photographic printing papers were the primary type until the2

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Takahashi Norihide1910s or 1920s.
Developing-out papers using silver bromide emulsions that, after exposure, develop the image also emerged,
becoming the dominant type in the twentieth century. There are several types, including highly sensitive bromide
papers, which appeared in the 1870s, gaslight papers, invented in the 1880s and used mainly for contact prints, andchloro-bromide paper, which were in the middle range between bromide and gaslight papers. After these highly
sensitive developing-out papers appeared, the practice of enlarging prints from small negatives also gradually
emerged.

The Reproducible Photograph

The fundamental photographic process different from the early daguerreotype and ambrotype was the negativepositive process. It originated with the calotype, which William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) invented. The image on
the negative reverses the dark and light values of the subject; when the negative is placed in contact with a similarly
sensitized paper and exposed to light, the values are reversed again, producing a positive image. Moreover, it waspossible to produce an infinite number of prints from one negative.
From the early years of photography, its technology was used as a method for duplicating planar works such as
paintings. In the same way, photographs themselves were often re-photographed (copied) to make a new photographic
print. For instance, a photograph of which the original negative had been lost was copied and printed to make a new
photograph.
Copying photographs was also a way to change the size of a photograph, in the age of the collodion wet-plate
negative and albumin print. To make a small print from a large negative, the process was to make a contact print,then photograph it to create a smaller negative and produce a new contact print from that negative, which would be
the finished photograph. The photographs of scenes at famous places or pictures of famous people that were sold in a
calling-card-sized format (carte-de-visite) were almost always made using that process.
This exhibition includes several works produced by that process of reproduction, including Wreck of the Kaiten, a
ship operated by former shogunate forces, Portrait of Enomoto Takeaki, and Former Shogunate Warriors.

Hakodate, a Photographic Frontier

Hakodate is regarded, along with Nagasaki, Edo, and Yokohama, as one of the birthplaces of photography in Japan.
The history of photography in Japan begins in 1848, when a set of daguerreotype equipment arrived at Nagasaki. In
Europe and America, photography spread swiftly as a technology put to practical use as soon as it was made public.
In Japan, however, instead of widely applied, it was, for a time, studied and experimented with as part of researchon chemistry by scholars of Western studies in various regions or as part of domains’ projects to introduce and apply
scientific technologies from Europe and America. That limited implementation is distinctive of early photographic
history in Japan.
After that initial period, photography broke out of those limits and, from the 1860s on, professional photographers
opened studios in Edo, Yokohama, Nagasaki, and then Hakodate. Photography was being put to practical use,with Japanese photographers active throughout Japan in the Bakumatsu period. Most of those photographers’
work consisted, however, of private portrait photography. After the Meiji Restoration, the value of photography
to society was recognized, and Japanese photographers were commissioned by the government, the military, andother institutions to carry out official documentary photography. Their work was of the same nature as that ofphotographers in Europe and America.
In 1869, when the new Meiji government set up a Development Commission to open up the northern region ofJapan, construction of a new Sapporo headquarters began. In 1871, Tamoto Kenzo, in Hakodate, was requested by
the Development Commission to record the construction of the Sapporo Highway between Hakodate and Sapporo
and the state of the commission’s headquarters and activities in Sapporo. That work was carried by his apprentice
Ida Koichi, Baron Raimund von Stillfried (1839-1911) of Yokohama, his assistant Takebayashi Seiichi, and others,
who systematically photographed the Development Commission’s activities and produced what are known as the“Hokkaido development photographs.”Those Hokkaido development photographs are comparable to the body of photographs from the 1860s and 1870s
2
recording what was known as the frontier, the western part of the United States. It is been pointed out that the useof photography by many researchers studying the development of the American West had a major influence on the3
Hokkaido development photographs; they are quite similar. American photographers have given us a record of
unexplored lands, using the difficult wet-plate photography technique. That technique, used to photograph accurately

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Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Takahashi Norihide

in the unspoiled natural environment of the West and in a climate that, like Hokkaido, was at times quite cold, wasfurther refined and cultivated in Hokkaido.
In 1871, Yokoyama Matsusaburo was commissioned by Ninagawa Noritane (1835-1882), a Meiji government
official engaged in researching cultural properties, to create a photographic record of the gates and structures inside
the Edo Castle, then largely in ruins. The following year, 1872, Yokoyama took part in the Jinshin Survey of Cultural
Properties, carrying out the photography; that survey was conducted in the Kinki Region by the Museum Agency of
the Ministry of Education.
In 1877, when Saigo Takamori launched a revolt in Kagoshima and the Seinan War (also known as the Satsuma
Rebellion) broke out, at the request of the Nagasaki prefectural government, which had received an order for quelling
the rebellion from the council, Ueno Hikoma formed a photography team that photographed the military in action.
Those documentary photographs produced by Japanese photographers early in the Meiji period were similar to the45early records of cultural properties and wars produced by photographers in the West, if on a different scale. The
photographers active in Hokkaido were pioneers in documentary photography in Japan.
From the beginning of the Meiji period, Japanese photographers’ work was becoming truly practical, as in theWest. Hokkaido one might position as Japan’s frontier, and Hakodate was the starting point for its photography. It
was the place where a new frontier in Japanese photography was opened up.

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3

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Yokohama Museum of Art; nationally designated an Important Cultural Property in 2006.
A series of sets of photographs that includes the documentary photographs of the American West produced after America’s Civil
War by photographers participating in the survey expeditions carried out by the United States Geological Survey. Those series
include works by the photographers Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840-82), Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), and William Henry
Jackson (1843-1942), among others.
Ozawa Kenji, Bakumatsu - Meiji no shashin [Bakumatsu and Meiji photographs] (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 1997),
pp. 320-321; Oshita Tomokazu, “Sapporo Hondo ni kakawaru kiroku shashin gun wo megutte —Tamoto Kenzo, arui ha
Sutirufiito ni yoru satsuei no kanosei [On the group of documentary photographs about the Sapporo highway: The possibility
that they were taken by Tamoto Kenzo or Stillfried],” Hokkaido Art Museum Studies, No. 26, 2016, p. 5; Anne Wilkes Tucker(ed.), The History of Japanese Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Museum of Fine Art,
Houston, 2003), p. 6.
A classic example is the French government’s La commission des Monuments historiques, for which five photographers werecreate a resort of historic buildings, ruins, and landscapes throughout the country. Edouard Baldus (1813-90), Hippolyte Bayard(1801-87), Gustave Le Gray (1820-82), Henri Le Secq (1818-1882) took part in what was called La Mission héliographique.
In 1855, Roger Fenton (1819-69) of Britain and other photographers documented the Crimean War. In the United States,
Mathew B. Brady (1823-96), who had studios in New York and Washington, DC organized Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840-82),
Alexander Gardner (1821-82), and other photographers to accompany the Union troops and systematically document the Civil
War (1861-65).

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Takahashi Norihide

The Russian Consulate and the Introduction of Photographic Technology
Oshita Tomokazu
Chief curator, Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art

Relations between Russia and Hakodate began in 1793, with the arrival of an expedition led by Adam Kirillovich
Laxman (1766-1806), Russia’s first envoy to Japan. His mission was to return six Japanese castaways, including
Daikokuya Kodayu, and request that Japan open trade with Russia (No. 1-8). Those relations were finally formalized
in the mid nineteenth century, during the Bakumatsu or closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate (1855-1868).
In 1853, Yevfimiy Vasilyevich Putyatin (1803-83), ambassador plenipotentiary, led an expedition, with the frigate
Pallada as his flagship, to Nagasaki to secure a treaty with Japan. In 1854, with the Diana having replaced the Pallada
as his flagship, he arrived in Hakodate again, three months after the American expedition led by Matthew Calbraith
Perry (No. 1-9, 1-19).
The photographer Eliphalet Brown, Jr. (1816-86) accompanied Perry’s expedition and made daguerreotypes. Fiveof those images are famed as the oldest extant photographs taken in Japan (No. 1-5).
Putyatin’s expedition included a skilled sketch artist who had also mastered the technology of photography:
Captain Alexander Fedorovich Mozhaysky (1825-90). In addition, a set of photographic equipment was on board
the Pallada, the ship on which Putyatin first arrived in Japan.1 Mozhaysky’s daguerreotype of Mayuge Osho, thenthe chief priest at Gyokusenji Temple in Shimoda, is the only photograph that survives from that expedition, but
Russia’s Central Naval Museum has sketches by Mozhaysky, including three of Hakodate: The Diana at Anchor in the
Port of Hakodate, Inside the Hakodate Temple Precincts (Shomyoji), and Garden of a Temple in Hakodate. They may have been,
it has been suggested, drawn based on the daguerreotypes he himself produced.2
The Diana, with Mozhaysky on board, was at anchor at Shimoda in 1854 when the huge Ansei earthquake struck. The
ship was badly damaged and eventually sank. Mozhaysky was put in charge of building a replacement, named the Heda,
based on plans for a schooner that happened to have been on board another ship in the expedition. In 1883, back in Russia,
he experimented with the first propeller-driven, heavier-than-air aircraft, twenty years before the Wright brothers.
In 1855, after the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between Japan and Russia was concluded, a Russian
consulate was established in Hakodate. The f irst Russian consul to be assigned there was Iosif Antonovich
Goshkevich. He was born in the Minsk Governate (now Belarus). After graduating from the St. Petersburg
Theological Seminary, he served in the Russian clerical legation in Beijing for nearly a decade, starting in 1840,
where he studied the history of China and its current circumstances. The knowledge of the Chinese language
and its writing system that he acquired there won him a position as interpreter on the expedition to Japan led by
Putyatin. He then learned Japanese from Tachibana Kosai, whom he met when his ship was wrecked off Shimoda.
Later, with Tachibana’s cooperation, he compiled the first full-scale Japanese-Russian dictionary (Russko-Iaponskii
Slovar) (No. 1-11). Given that background, he was chosen to be the first Russian consul in Hakodate. Goshkevich
was linguistically talented—he is said to have spoken thirteen languages—and was knowledgable in many areas,
including, for example, entomological research. He was also familiar with photography, which he probably mastered
while in China.3
In 1858, Goshkevich arrived in Hakodate with his family, secretary, physician, a naval officer, a priest, and other1

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Oshita Tomokazu

members of his entourage. There they carried out their official duties while also making connections, in many ways,
with the local people and sharing Russian culture and advanced technologies with them. Ivan Makhova, a cantor
at the chapel attached to the consulate (No. 1-13, 1-14), compiled a book called The Russian Alphabet, the first Russian
language textbook for children in Japan. The second priest to serve at that chapel, Nicholas Kasatkin (1836-1912),
later became Archbishop of All Japan and also was passionately engaged in running a language school. In 1868,
when Christianity was still forbidden among the Japanese, he baptized three people in Hakodate, the first Japanese
members of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The physicians at the Russian consulate not only treated the consular staff but also provided advanced, free,
medical care for Hakodate residents outside the consulate. They also taught that advanced medical knowledge
to Japanese. Hakodate, in the Bakumatsu period, thus produced many doctors, including Fukase Yoshun, with aknowledge of Western medicine.
Many other bodies of knowledge were also transmitted from the Russian consulate, from botany to shipbuilding.
Among the advanced technologies reaching Hakodate from Russia was photography.
Yokoyama Matsusaburo (1838-84), a giant among Japan’s early photographers, encountered photography in
Hakodate. While he first experienced photography there while Eliphalet Brown, Jr., a member of Perry’s expedition,
was taking his daguerreotypes, his further encounter was through the Russian consulate. Yokoyama learned that thefirst consul, Goshkevich, not only knew about photographic technqiues but also had a set of photographic equipmentwith which he was shooting there. Thanks to his younger brother Matsuzo, who spoke Russian, Yokoyama becameacquainted with Goshkevich and acquired an overview of photographic technology. He also acquired direct
knowledge of Western-style painting techniques by working as an assistant to a Russian painter named Lehman, towhom he was introduced by Nicholas Kasatkin, the priest.4
Kizu Kokichi (1830-95), Hakodate’s first commercial photographer, also learned photography through theRussian consulate. An article in the April 10, 1912, Hakodate Mainichi Newspaper is an early account providing detailed
information on Kizu’s career.5 It states that he was born in what is now Shibata, Niigata prefecture, and moved to
Hakodate in the latter half of the 1850s. A tailor, he served people at the consulate, where he met Goshkevich, theconsul. When Kizu went home to Shibata, he acquired some photographic equipment that he happened to run
across there but was unable to take photographs successfully. It was only after returning to Hakodate and learning
the techniques from Goshkevich that he began working as a photographer and opened his own photo studio. Anothersource states that Kizu was taught photography by both Goshkevich and a “Dr. Zerensuke.”
The most famous of the Japanese photographers active in the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods was Tamoto Kenzo(1831-1912). He photographed the supporters of the Shogunate in the Battle of Hakodate (1868). From 1871 to 1873,
he was hired by the Development Commission to photograph the development of Sapporo and the construction ofa new highway by the Development Commission. He then photographed the government offices and other facilities
newly built in Hakodate and major events there. The photographs he produced are highly valued today as Japan’s
first documentary photographs. The event that led to Tamoto’s becoming a photographer occurred in 1859, when,after arriving in Hakodate, he had his right leg amputated due to frostbite. That surgery was performed by aphysician named “Zerensukii” at the Russian consulate’s hospital, from whom Tamoto then learned photography.
That doctor’s name is given many renderings in the Japanese records concerning the consulate at that time,
including Zaresuki, Zaresukee, Zaresuke, and Zerensuke.6 He is thought to have been Dr. Zalesskii, the second
physician to serve at the hospital attached to the Russian consulate in Hakodate. Zalesskii trained as a physician
in Saint Petersburg and Paris and is said to have developed special techniques for treating syphilis. Fukase Yoshun
and many other Japanese physicians studied with him. Zalesskii served in Hakodate from 1863 to 1866. When the
Russian hospital there closed in 1866, he transferred to Nagasaki, becoming a staff physician at the hospital there.7
According to a record by Goshkevich, he also performed the autopsy on a Russian sailor who was killed in a fightwith an Japanese person.8
According to an article written by a journalist from Vladivostok, Nikolai Petrovich Matveev (1865-1941; pen
name Nikolai Amursky) in 1903, his father, Pyotr Matveey, who was an associate physician at the consulate’s hospital,
amputated part of a patient’s leg, had him learn photography. And Nicholas Kasatkin provided him with his firstcamera.9 If so, then it was Pyotr Matveey who performed the surgery on Tamoto and taught him photography. In
any case, he definitely learned photography via the Russian consulate’s hospital.
Another individual who became involved with photography via the Russian consulate in Hakodate, in the
Bakumatsu period, was Niijima Jo ( Joseph Hardy Neesima, 1843-90), who founded Doshisha English School (nowDoshisha University, in Kyoto). Niijima came to Hakodate in 1864 in search of a way to travel overseas and study
Christianity. He met the priest Nicholas Kasatkin and, while teaching him Japanese, was treated for an eye diseaseby the Dr. Zalesskii who is thought to have taught Tamoto photography, at the Russian hospital. According to2

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Oshita Tomokazu

Niijima’s “Account of Hakodate,” outpatients and hospitalized patients were separated. If hospitalized, they were
given food and clothing, and a stipend was provided by the Czar of Russia; treatment was free of charge.10 (Thataccount also gives the doctor’s name as Zaresukee.)			
Niijima managed to stow away on a ship from Hakodate and head for the United States in 1864. Right before
his departure, Nicholas Kasatkin encouraged Niijima to have a portrait photograph of himself taken there and send
it to his home, because there was going to be a “photography meeting” at the consulate. An ambrotype bust portraitof Niijima thought to have been taken on that occasion exists at Doshisha University. This cased photograph has apreserver frame around it and a brass mat. The quality of the photograph is poor; it is barely possible to make out theoutline of the subject’s upper body.11 (The well-known photograph of Niijima in disguise, to make his escape, was shot
later, in America.)
The ambrotypes of Hayashi Gisuke and Hayashi Chutaro in this exhibition (No. 1-16, 1-17) have brass mats withthe same design as the mat on the photograph taken of Niijima at the Russian consulate. The notes on their backs
state, “Photographed at the foreigners’ residence on an auspicious day in the sixth month of Genji 1 [ July, 1864].”
Since that is the same date on which Niijima’s photograph was taken,12 they were probably photographed at the same
“photography meeting” at the Russian consulate as Niijima’s.13 The photographer may have been Goshkevich or
possibly Zalesskii.
Goshkevich, Nicholas Kasatkin, Zalesskii, and other staff members at the Russian consulate actively madecontact with Japanese society and freely shared new cultural knowledge and technologies. At the time, Russia, having
become aware, due to its defeat in the Crimean War, that it was actually a rather backward country, was working
to improve. In Japan, it was probably trying maintain a better relationship, so as not to be left behind by Britain orFrance. The Russian consulate in Hakodate played a major role in that effort.
To Japanese in the Bakumatsu period, Hakodate was a window on Russia, an advanced nation and anotheraspect of the “West.” Attracting many Bakumatsu Japanese with an interest in the West, whether in languages ormedical science or other fields, Hakodate was where they could absorb bunmei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.”
Photography was, of course, one of those advanced technologies flowing into Japan from Russia via Hakodate.

1

2
3
4

5
6

7

8
9
10
11
12
13

3

Konstatin Guber, “The Artistic and Scientific Legacy of Alexander Mozhaiskiy: The Sailor, the Artist and the Inventor,” 1st
COE International Symposium: What Are Nonwritten Cultural Materials? – Memorizing and Documenting Human Culture, (Yokohama:
Kanagawa University, 2005).
Kuwajima Yoichi, “Hakodate shashinshi ko [On the history of photography in Hakodate],” Chiikishi kenkyu Hakodate [Hakodate
local history research], no. 17, 1993.
Sources, possibly partially fictional, include Odisseĭ s Beloĭ Rusi (Belorussian Odyssey) by by Vitaliĭ Grigorʹevich Guzanov, aRussian nonfiction writer. (Minsk: Belarus, 1969).
Tomisaka Ken, Kashiwagi Tomoo, Okatsuka Akiko, Tsutenro nikki: Yokoyama Matsusaburo to Meiji shoki no shashin yoga insatsu[Tsutenro journal: Yokoyama Matsusaburo and early Meiji photography, Western-style painting, and printing]. (Kyoto:
Shibunkaku, 2014).
Okada Kenzo, “Hakodate hyakuchin: Kizu Kokichi Okina ha yofukuya to shashinya no ganso [The venerable Kizu Kokichi
was the founder of Western-style clothing stores and photography studios],” Hakodata Mainichi Newspaper, May 5, 1916.
Tanisawa Shoichi, “Shiryo shokai Bakumatsu Hakodate Roshia byoin ni kansuru shiryo [Introducing historical documents:
Documents concerning the Russian hospital in Hakodate during the Bakumatsu period],” Chiikishi kenkyu Hakodate [Hakodate
local history research], no. 2, 1985.
Matsumoto Akitomo, “Kenkyu nooto Hakodate Rosia byoin ni kansuru [Research notes: Supplement to information on
physicians at the Russian hospital in Hakodate],” Nihon ishigaku zasshi [ Journal of Japanese medical history], No. 32-3, 198 6;
Hara Teruyuki, “Guriinberuto Hakodate saisho no shashinshi [Greenbelt: Hakodate’s first photographers],” Chiikishi kenkyu
Hakodate [Hakodate local history research], no. 23, 1996.
Ito Kazuya, “Goshikeevichi bunsho wo sagashite, kan [Exploring the Goshkevich papers, full edition],” Chiikishi kenkyu Hakodate[Hakodate local history research], no. 34, 2002.
Hara Teruyuki, “Guriinbereuto Hakodate saisho no shashinshi (zainichi Roshiajin no seikatsu kara) [Greenbelt: Hakodate’s first
photographers (from the lives of Russians in Japan)],” Chiikishi kenkyu Hakodate [Hakodate local history research], no. 23, 1996.
Tanisawa, op. cit.
Kuwajima Yoichi, “Hakodate dasshutsu chokuzen no Niijima Jo shashin [Photograph of Niijima Jo from right before his escapefrom Hakodate],” Doshisha Joho (Doshisha news), No. 82, 1987.
Shibuya Shiro, Hokkaido shashinshi Bakumatsu, Meiji [Hokkaido photographers, Bakumatsu and Meiji]. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1983.
But since the same brass frame is photographed in the photograph of Hayashi Gisuke, we know that photograph was a
reproduction.

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Oshita Tomokazu

Panoramic Views of Hakodate
Okuno Susumu
Curator, Hakodate City Museum

The Town Called Hakodate

Hakodate1 is located on Hokkaido, then called Ezochi (land of the Ezo, or Ainu), and is where, early on, Wajin( Japanese from Honshu and further south, not the indigenous Ainu) crossed from Honshu and began to trade andengage in other activities there. Around the fourteenth century, the Wajin built a base, a Tate, there, in a place where
the indigenous Ainu were living. After the rise of the Matsumae clan and the establishment of the Matsumae domain
on Ezochi, that base, as well as the ports of Matsumae and Esashi, became centers for collecting and distributing theseafood and other marine products produced in the area as well as a trading post.
As domestic trade grew more vigorous, the town that became Hakodate expanded. In the latter half of the Edo
period, apprehensions about foreign ships entering Japanese waters and the Russian policy of advancing southward
led the shogunate to place Ezochi and specifically the Hakodate area as under its direct control. The shogunate madeHakodate its Ezochi base, and the town developed swiftly as the core area of the shogunate’s activities on Ezochi.
In 1854, the US Navy expedition led by Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Hakodate. During that visit,
the photographer Eliphalet Brown, Jr. (1816-86), who accompanied Perry on the voyage, took the first photographsof Hakodate. As is well known, Hakodate encountered photographic technology earlier than other places in Japan.
Then, after the port opened to foreign trade, the Russian consul, Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich, shared photographic
technology with Kizu Kokichi and Tamoto Kenzo. Yokoyama Matsusaburo, who became active as a photographer
in Tokyo, also got his start in Hakodate, which has played a remarkable role in the history of photography in Japan.
As an open port, with foreign ships arriving and foreign residents living there, Hakodate experienced many
opportunities to be photographed, and many early photographs of Hakodate have been confirmed to exist abroad aswell as in Japan. This essay addresses one group, panoramic photographs in considering Hakodate’s history and thepanoramic photographs2 that document it.
Pictographic Maps and Panoramic Photographs

As the shogunate came to regard its Ezochi policies as important issues, the island became the target of intenseinterest, and the volume of information produced about it grew. Maps were a significant type of that information,
and a variety of maps of Hakodate, from pictorial maps of the areas in which various domains operated whenordered to send forces to defend the region, to Hakodate True Views (polychrome prints, No. 1-3), which were on saleto the general public.3 These maps follow several patterns (Fig. 1), and, while limited in what they present, are usefulmaterials giving us information on major buildings, institutions, and sites at that time.
The Meiji period (1868-1912) saw the emergence of the panoramic photograph as a record giving a general viewof the city and its port. There are, broadly, two patterns of panoramic photographs of Hakodate from that period.
One has Mt. Hakodate, which was included in earlier pictorial maps, as the background and gives “a full view of thecity of Hakodate” (pattern 1). The other gives “a full view of Hakodate harbor” through a panorama looking downfrom Mt. Hakodate towards the streets of the city and its harbor (pattern 2).

1

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Okuno Susumu

Figure 1. Patterns of Maps of Hakodate

1. A flat map showing only the townscape

1-1

1-2

2. A flat map showing the fan-shaped landform, from directly above

2-1

2-2

3. A bird’s-eye view with Mt. Hakodate in the background and the townscape and harbor in the foreground.

3-1

1-1
1-2
2-1
2-2
3-1
3-2

2

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

3-2

Survey Map of Hakodate, 1801
Upper lefthand portion of the
Officially Permitted Full Map ofHakodate (1860)
Map of Morioka Domain
Administration on Ezochi(Hokkaido)
Full Map of Hakodate
Townscape (1887)
Map of Hakodate, Ōshū (early
1860s)
True View of Hakodate (1868)

Okuno Susumu

Figure 2. Patterns of Multilayered Development of Hakodate Panoramic Photographs

Pattern 1: A full view of the city of Hakodate

Pattern 2: A full view of Hakodate Harbor

1869
1871

1872

1873

1876
1876

1880

1882
1883

1888
1889

1892

1892

1897

3

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Okuno Susumu

Pattern 1
A full view of the cityof Hakodate

Pattern 2
A full view of
Hakodate Harbor

OthersDate

Probable location from which photographed

Photographer

Collection

1871*

Near Thompson Shipyard

Noguchi Gennosuke (?)

Private collection(Ohtsuka Kazuyoshi)

1872

Near Thompson Shipyard

Raimund von Stillfried

Tokyo National Museum
Image: TNM Image Archives

1873

Near the Blakison residence

Christian Polak Collection

1876*

Near Hakodate Cold Storage

Hakodate City Central Library

1880

Near current location of
Toyokawa Inari Shrine

Hakodate City Central Library

1882*

Near Hakodate Cold Storage

1892

Near Hakodate Cold Storage

1869*

Near Atago Shrine

Hakodate City Central Library
Tamoto Kenzo

Hakodate City Central Library
Hakodate City Central Library

1876

Near Yakushiyama

Hokkaido University Library

1883

Atago Shrine mountain path

Hakodate City Central Library

1888

Near Yakushiyama

Tamoto Kenzo

Hakodate City Central Library

1889*

Near Yakushiyama

Tamoto Kenzo

Hakodate City Central Library
and Tokyo
Photographic Art Museum

1892*

Near Yakushiyama(Tamoto Kenzo)

Hakodate City Central Library,private collection,
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

1897*

Near Yakushiyama

Tamoto Kenzo

Hakodate City Museum,
Hakodate City Central Library

1876*

On Hachiman slope

Hakodate City Central Library

1888*

On Hachiman slope

Hakodate City Central Library*Works included in the exhibition.Yakushiyama (252 m above sea level) is one of the peaks that compose Mt. Hakodate. It is to thenorth of Mt. Hakodate’s peak (334 m above sea level). The Hakodate Cold Storage, Thompson Shipyard, and Blakiston residence
were all in the bay area where the Hakodate Meijikan and La Vista Hakodate Bay are located today. The current location of the
Toyokawa Inari Shrine is somewhat inland from them.

Panoramic photographs were used for their documentary qualities and reproducibility and thus, it has been
pointed out, were similar in nature to maps.4 If we take Hakodate as an example, that observation applies in many
ways. Pattern-one panoramas, in particular, have a point of view that is quite similar to bird’s-eye-view pictorial
maps such as the Map of Hakodate, Ōshu. Viewing them in terms of point of view, we can confirm that the earlymodern pictorial maps and the panoramic photographs that appeared from Meiji on overlap, and there is continuity
in the way we can read the townscape and the sights from them.
But while the earlier maps and the panoramic photographs may be similar in purpose and point of view, thetwo media have at least one major difference: the greater recording density of the photograph. If we look the Map
of Hakodate, Ōshu, drawn in the early 1860s, we see that in addition to the major official facilities, including themagistrate’s office, the Benten Daiba fortress, the Goryōkaku fort, the customs house, and the Yamanoue licensed
quarter, the various consulates (Russia, USA, Great Britain, France) and the foreign ships in the harbor are
distinctively depicted. That the map intended to be a record of the open port is easy to discern.
Panoramic photographs, by contrast, had a similar point of view but, except for those equipped with captions ora record of what was photographed, it is not easy to determine, from the photograph itself, the names of the subjects
and their significance. For example, the 1889 panoramic photograph (No. 3-9) was described in a newspaper as, “Thephotographer Tamoto Kenzo of Kaisho-machi worked to photograph a full view of all the naval vessels from every
country at anchor . . . he photographed more than twenty ships, from the Imperial Navy, and British and Dutch
ships at anchor there, from beside the Yakushidō temple on Mt. Hakodate and from the old fortress to offshore of
Omorihama, giving a clear view of Hakodate as a whole. These were ordered by the Hokkaido government officeand consist of series of three or four images, which have already been sent” (September 18, 1889, Hakodate Shimbun).
Looking at the photographs, however, it is difficult to grasp that information from them alone.
While pictorial maps are drawn with deliberate distortions, so that, while communicating the general view, they
make clear what the map maker intended to present, the photograph, given its nature as a medium, includes visual
images of things other than those that the photographer intended to include. That is a major difference between thetwo media.

4

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Okuno Susumu

As photography and pictorial maps developed in an overlapping manner in the Meiji period, pictorial maps
produced on the basis of panoramic photographs also appeared. The intention behind View of Hakodate (No. 3-10),
which was published in 1891, is explained as, “The existing full views of Hakodate, or many of them, are not crudely
done but have been simplified so that one cannot seen the all details; our company sees this and has photographed
the whole of Hakodate from the slopes of Mt. Gagyu and transferred those photographs to lithographs and printed
them . . . We depict all the public and private buildings on the streets of Hakodate without fail, including shrines andtemples and companies and residences of notables; all can be viewed and their details just as they actually are. We
present them all accurately. . . .” This pictorial map is strikingly similar to the 1889 panoramic photograph (No. 3-9).
It includes land reclaimed along the shore and shows buildings that were under construction in the 1889 photographas finished, adding information since the photographs were taken, but even the positions of the main ships in the
harbor are the same. Thus, those new details, we can conclude, were added in producing the pictorial map.
Pictorial maps had visually conveyed the nature of the city of Hakodate and its port, from the Edo period on. But
with maps based on surveying and the use of panoramic photographs in publications, due to advances in printing
technology, the number of such illustrated maps gradually declined.
Panoramic Photographs of Hakodate

Of the two patterns of panoramic photographs described above, Table 1 and Figure 2 present most of those produced
by 1897.5
Among them, Noguchi Gennosuke’s album of panoramic photographs (No. 3-2) is being exhibited for the firsttime. Among extant pattern-one type panoramic photographs, those in that album are extremely valuable, for they
were the earliest photographed. Much remains unknown about Noguchi; I look forward to the results of further
research.6
What is distinctive about panoramic photographs of Hakodate are the following three points:(1) They include panoramic photographs from early in the Meiji period;(2) Photogrpahs from a brief period post-Meiji also exist;(3) The places were the two patterns of panoramic photographs were shot were quite consistent.
In deciphering photographs, the origins of the photographer, whether a visitor or a resident, can be important.
For Hakodate panoramic photographs, however, both categories of photographers had as their objective providing an
overview of the city. The surviving photographs do not give a sense of clear differences based on the photographers’
origins. As many essays on the subject have observed, given the photographer’s intentions and the technicalconstraints on his work, such as the required exposure time, the resulting photographs may have fictional andarbitrary qualities. Fixed-point panoramic photographs, however, eliminate those qualities and succeed in producing“an image close to reality” through making full use of the recording qualities of photography. It is obvious thatphotography is an expressive means that can create artistic work. But in panoramic photographs capturing the cityand the bay broadly, the intention behind their production is clear. Rather than its expressive qualities, the recording
qualities of the photograph as an optical medium are in the fore.
How can we position the panoramic photograph with those qualities in terms of historical research? Let us
consider the example of the Sonoda Sanenori Residence (former Blakiston residence) (No. 3-90 and 3-91), photographs
are being exhibited here in a full-scale exhibition for the first time. The Sonoda residence was originally built in 1881as the Blakiston residence on Shokonsha slope (where Shokonsha is today’s Hakodate Gokoku Shrine) on the seaside
facing Hakodate’s port (near the parking lot beside the Hakodate Factory). This pattern-two panoramic photographenables to confirm the location of this building, just as on a map. The pattern-one panoramic photograph enables us
to observe the form of the building. It also lets us confirm the history of the building’s being moved.
Hakodate has suffered many major fires. In the early Meiji period alone, many fires occurred: in 1869, during
the Battle of Hakodate (“Deserter Fire,” 872 buildings burned down), 1871 (“Kiremise Fire,” 1,123 buildings burneddown), 1879 (“Yaneya Fire,” 1,314 buildings burned down), 1878 (954 building burned down), 1879 (2,326 buildings
burned down). After each fire, fire-prevention measures were taken, with efforts to improve the city plan and makebuildings fireproof. In revising the city plan, the move of the Blakiston residence mentioned above was carried out tomake the area around it a warehouse district.
Hakodate in Meiji was in a period of rapid modernization. The repeated fires and resulting revisions of thecity’s layout spurred that trend. The townscape changed rapidly due to the fires, but the changes were recordedin panoramic photographs, so it was possible to acquire visual images of Hakodate as it had been, and those arepreserved today.
Those fires, by causing the townscape of Hakodate to change significantly, also help us date photographs.
By relaying on newspapers and other written sources to trace the course of those changes, it is possible to specify

5

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Okuno Susumu

accurately the period when a panoramic photograph was taken. Analyzing the two patterns of panoramic
photographs, maps, and other documents about Hakodate, it is also possible to use visual information to confirm
historical events. These panoramic photographs are core materials testifying to Hakodate’s history.
Panoramic photographs are extent as printed photographs, primarily albumen prints, and as collodion wet plateand gelatin dry plate negatives. High-resolution digitalization of those negatives has made it possible to secure higher
definition images.7 High-resolution data has made it possible for the reproducibility innate to panoramic photographs
to be exercised and thus to analyze the city in greater detail.
Panoramic photographs of Hakodate were created with a combination of the landforms distinctive to Hakodate,the history that unfolded there, and the techniques of panoramic photography. Those photographs have a“layeredness” and “fixed point-ness” that go beyond the ordinary documentary photographs that developed later.
Hakodate panoramic photographs could thus be said to be, as a group, a rare masterpiece from the Meiji period.8

The Blakiston residence before it was moved (building in the center), in a panoramic
photograph from 1876.

1.
2.

3.
4.
5.

6.
7.
8.

6

The former Blakiston residence (Sonoda residence) after it was
moved, in a 1882 panoramic photograph.

Hakodate was assigned the kanji characters 函館 in 1869. Until then, the name was usually written as 箱館 . In this article, I
consistently use 函館 except in the titles of historical materials.
Panoramic photographs connect two or more negatives and prints to provide a wide field of view. This exhibition presents
photographs dating no later than 1897. In terms of its economy, Hakodate developed greatly because it became the base for
the Russian territory fishing industry during the Russo-Japanese War (1905-1905). Its population increased dramatically inthe 1910s to 1920s. But the Hakodate Fortress was established in 1898, and the Fortress Areas Act, which went into effect on
July 1, 1900, then forbade photographing land or sea within about 10 kilometers of Mt. Hakodate. That restricted panoramicand other photgoraphy. Until the end of World War II, standard, partial photographs of the city, taken with the permission of
Hakodate Fortress (after 1927, Tsugaru Fortress), were mainly produced. They were very different from earlier photographs andwere lacking in force as media.
These can be seen on line at the Hakodate City Central Library Digital Archives.
Mitsui Keishi, “Panorama shashin ko [On the panoramic photograph],” photographers’ gallery press, no. 8, 2009.
This essay discusses only some of the extant panoramic photographs. With research on photographic materials located overseas
underway, it is highly likely that older panoramic photographs will be discovered.
It has been pointed out that the photographer who produced the 1869 panoramic photograph is likely to have been Yokoyama
Matsusaburo (Noto Takaharu, Hakodate Shashin no Kai). At the time, he was in Hakodate, having raced there from Edo
out of concern for his mother’s health. He visited Aomori on his way back (in the seventh month), and a record states that
Kanematsu Sekkyo (a Hirosaki domain Confucian scholar) visited Sasaki Genshun (the Hirosaki domain physician and Dutch
studies scholar) and happened to meet Yokoyama, from Hakodate, there. Yokoyama showed the photographs he had taken of
the Hakodate harbor. “We could see the mountains and forests, the houses, and the ships,” according to the Kanematsu Sekkyo
Sensei den [Biography of Kanematsu Sekkyo], Mori Rinsuke, 1931.
See the essay by Ohtsuka Kazuyoshi.
Some of the high resolution data digitized from those negatives is available at the Hakodate City Central Library Digital
Archives.
Noto Takaharu of the Hakodate Shashin no Kai described the fixed point quality as meaning the panoramic photographs of
Hakodate are a group of “miraculous panoramic photographs”

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Okuno Susumu

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate1
Mitsui Keishi
Curator, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture

Introduction
There are two reasons for being involved with a museum of photography.2 One is that one has an interest in thehistory of photography. The other is to have contact with photographs as objects. (Statement by Kaneko Ryuichi
in “What was the Tsukuba Photography Museum?” in Proceedings of the “Rethinking the Tsukuba Photography
Museum” symposium; Aota Yumi, Kobayashi Anna, 1985: When the Photograph Became Art (Seikyusha, 2014).

This exhibition is the second in our Geneses of Photography in Japan series, which addresses the early history ofphotography in Japan3 and the regions in which it originated. Today, the digital transformation4 of almost allphotography has robbed the photograph of its materiality; it is no longer possible to touch a photograph. Until theearly twenty-first century, however, the photograph was, physically, an “object” that it was possible to “have contact
with.” These exhibitions explore those places that were the origins of the object known as a photograph in Japan.
Prior to this series, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum held a series of four Dawn of Japanese Photography (“Dawn”)
exhibitions, starting in 2007, each focused on a specific region. In 2017, the series was completed with a summary,Dawn of Japanese Photography: The Antholog y.5 For that series, our museum surveyed the early photographic holdings ofmuseums, libraries, universities, and other institutions all over Japan, learning what sorts of Japanese photographs,
and how many, their collections included from the late Edo and Meiji periods (about 1853 to 1900). The exhibitions
were organized geographically, by the locations of the institutions owning the photographs. Appreciating theoriginals of early photographs made clear that the physical object known as the photograph made a long journey
through time to reach us. The photograph as physical object can also, however, travel through space. The Dawn
exhibitions prioritized reporting on our surveys of collections, to achieve an overview of the early photographs
extant in Japan. The exhibitions were thus organized by the locations of the institution owning the photographs, andthe subjects of the photographs exhibited were not necessarily geographically consistent. For example, a late Edo
period photograph of the Kamakura Daibutsu (Great Buddha, Kanagawa prefecture) in the collection of a Nagasaki
university was included in the Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa exhibition in the series, since Nagasaki is on Kyushu.
A Meiji period photograph of Shuri Castle (Okinawa prefecture) owned by a museum in Yamagata prefecture wasincluded in the Hokkaido and Tohoku exhibition. Visitors to the Dawn exhibitons, however, expressed a desire tosee early photographs linked to regional history. In response, working from the basis of the survey of photographic
holdings conducted for that series, we shifted our perspective to incorporate local history materials not limited tophotography and began producing our Geneses of Photography in Japan series.
The first installment in this new series, held in 2018, focused on Nagasaki and introduced maps, prints, and othervisual materials, including works of art, related to the culture of photography in that region. This exhibition, thesecond in the series, implements that concept with its focus shifted to Hakodate, Hokkaido.
The title of the series, Geneses of Photography in Japan, should not be understood as implying that photography
originated in Japan, not Europe. Rather, these exhibitions address the places where photography entered Japan and

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Mitsui Keishi

began to develop here.
Nagasaki was the earliest place in Japan to which photographic equipment was imported. It was the starting point
for the spread of the culture of photography in the region in and south of the Kansai region. What, then, was therole of Hakodate, the subject of this exhibition? The earliest extant collection of photographs of Japan was taken by
Eliphalet Brown, Jr. (1816-1886), who accompanied Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858) on the second
visit of his US Navy squadron of Black Ships in 1854. That collection includes Endo Matazaemon and His Retainers(National Important Cultural Property),6 which was taken in Hakodate, on what is now Hokkaido, the northernmostof the main Japanese islands. Hakodate can thus be cited as the place where the oldest extant photographs of Japan
were taken. In addition, the Hokkaido Development Commission, which was responsible for the agricultural andeconomic development of Hokkaido from 1869 to 1882, commissioned many documentary photographs of its
projects. Those photographs, commonly known as the Hokkaido Development Photographs,7 focus on Sapporo,
Asahikawa, and other areas for development. Hakodate, however, had already been somewhat “civilized.” It had
been the site of the shogun’s magistrate’s office for the Ezo (now Hokkaido) region in the Edo period. It was also an
important port throughout that period and continued to be the point of entry for spreading Wajin culture (the cultureof Japanese from Honshu and further south, not the indigenous Ainu) there. Hakodate was not part of the wild,
uncivilized region to which the development efforts were being applied. Given, however, that experiments with dairy
farming and other experimental projects related to Hokkaido’s development were carried out in the Hakodate area,
it can be seen as one of the points of origin in that development. Hakodate was also the gateway to Hokkaido forphotographers who came to the territory under development as well as the base for the photographers who produced
the Hokkaido Development Photographs. Given that Hakodate was also the first place photographs were taken in
Hokkaido, it is the appropriate location in which to seek photography’s genesis.
The Origins of Photography

By the twentieth century, photography had been established as a technique by which durable images were created bycapturing an optical image and fixing it, using chemicals.
The daguerreotype, the first successful photographic technique, was invented by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre(1787-1851), who announced his discovery in January 1839. The details of the technique were made public that
August, and a huge boom emerged. By the end of that year, Daguerre’s instructions for producing daguerreotypes,
which he had written in French, had been translated into many other languages in Europe and America, and the
new technology was swiftly shared.
The date of the announcement of the daguerreotype was, in Japan, the eleventh month of Tempo 9.8 Tokugawa
Ieyoshi (1793-1853) had just become the twelfth “barbarian-quelling generalissimo,” i.e., Tokugawa shogun. His
father and the previous shogun, Ienari, had, however, retained de facto authority, and the political situation was
in turmoil. More than a decade would pass before Commodore Perry and his Black Ships would force the openingof the country in the closing years of the shogunate, but changes were coming. In 1838, the year before Daguerreannounced his invention, the Morrison Incident had occurred, in which an American merchant ship, the Morrison,
was f ired upon when it attempted to approach the Japanese coast.9 That event caused many involved in thegovernment to predict that Japan would soon be unable to avoid contact with Europeans and Americans.
Meanwhile, the arrival of photographic technology and the birth of photography in Japan began in Nagasaki,
where the oldest record states that in 1843, the merchant Ueno Toshinojo tried to import a complete set of theequipment necessary to produce daguerreotypes. The set was not, however, complete; lacking evidence that it would
work, he chose not to acquire it. In 1848, he tried to important a full set again; this time, it did arrive at Nagasaki.
Ueno had imported it due to his relationships with the Nabeshima family, rulers of the Saga domain (Hizen) andthe Shimazu family, rulers of the Satsuma domain (Kagoshima), leaders in adopting new technologies. The oldest
extant photograph taken by a Japanese, using that imported equipment, is a portrait of the Satsuma daimyo, Portraitof Shimazu Nariakira (National Important Cultural Property).10 Ueno Hikoma (1838-1904), who opened a commercial
photography studio on the shore of the Nakashima River in Nagasaki in 1862, was the son of Ueno Toshinojo, who
had imported that first set of daguerreotype equipment. Hikoma is known as a pioneering Japanese photographer
who trained many others. Before opening his studio, he had written a chemistry textbook, Seimikyoku Hikkei (Chemist’s
Handbook), which included a detailed description of photographic techniques and was the first technical manual on
photography in Japan. That history is why Nagasaki’s position in the origins of photography in Japan is unshakeable.
Hakodate as a Cradle of Japanese Photography

The first commercial photography studio in Hakodate opened in 1864, two years later than in Nagasaki, but
Hakodate’s history is well worthy of its positioning as one of photography’s points of origin. Shifting to consider the2

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Mitsui Keishi

nationalities of the early instructors who taught Japanese photographers makes us perceive what is distinctive about
Hakodate.
In Nagasaki, Ueno Hikoma had conduced research in collaboration with Horie Kuwajiro (1831-1866), a samurai
from the Tsu domain (Mie prefecture) who had received instruction from Dutch physicians. Hikoma received further
technical instruction from Pierre Joseph Rossier (1829-1886), a Swiss photographer who was stationed in Nagasaki,
completing his mastery of photographic techniques.
The f irst commercial photographer in Japan, was Orrin Erastus Freeman (1830-1866), an American in
Yokohama. Shimooka Renjo, who opened his studio in Yokohama slightly earlier than Ueno Hikoma did in
Nagasaki, had begun seriously studying photographic techniques due to his relationship with the American
photographer John Wilson (1816-1868), in Yokohama. His deep relationships with Samual Robbins Brown (1810-1880),
a missionary sent to Japan by America’s Dutch Reformed Church, and other Christians there led to his learning thealbumin print technique as well.11
Thus, Yokohama was, like Nagasaki, a place through which photography techniques reached Japan fromthe United States and Western Europe and where Japanese photographers learned them. In Hakodate, however
photographic techniques arrived via Russia, and Japanese photographers learned them there.12 The first to opena photography studio in Hakodate, Kizu Kokichi (1830-1895), was from what is now the city Shibata in Niigata
prefecture. He moved to Hakodate in the Ansei era (1854-1859) and acquired a set of photographic equipment, but
had no idea how to use it. Then Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich (1814-1875), the Russian consul, gave him instructions,and he succeeded in taking photographs. With that technique in hand, he opened his studio in Shinchi-cho,
Hakodate (now Funami-cho 1113).14 Tamoto Kenzo (1831-1912), who took portraits of Hijikata Toshizo (1835-1869)
and panoramic photographs of the port of Hakodate, also learned photographic techniques from a Russian who wasa physician. Tamoto trained many apprentices, including Takebayashi Seiichi (1842-1908), and managed to survive
the Battle of Hakodate and devote himself to the development of the culture of photography in Hakodate.15
Work by photographers not based in Hakodate, such as Baron Raimund von Stillfried (1839-1911), who wasinvited there by members of the Hokkaido Development Commission, also survives.16 Noguchi Gennosuke (18441896?), who was hired by the Development Commission, did visit Hakodate and take photographs, although he was
not a photographer. He did not make photography his life’s work, but he did make effective use of the technology, but
always as a government official.17 Noguchi’s and von Stillfried’s photographs made the place called Hakodate known
throughout Japan and in Europe.
Conclusion

Early photographic techniques, including photography in Hakodate, consisted of capturing an optical image andfixing it, using chemicals. For example, the collodion wet-plate process, which was the dominant technique until the
mid-Meiji period (c. 1885-1900), required that the photographer make his own negatives (photosensitive materials) bycoating sheets of glass in a darkroom with chemicals he himsel had prepared. With this process, if the coating on theglass dried out, it became waterproof, and the solution used to develop the image could not penetrate it. Thus, it wasnecessary to process the negative, using the chemical solutions required, right after shooting, while it was still damp.
Since the developing had to be performed in the dark, having a darkroom near the camera was essential.
For example, to take a 10x12 inch panoramic photograph looking down at the city, such as No. 3-9, View of theport of Hakodate required not just a camera and tripod. Only when the glass sheets, multiple chemicals, vats needed fordeveloping and fixing the images, and water had been carried up the mountainside and a tent to use as a darkroom
was set up could preparations for taking photographs begin. In addition, the collodion wet-plate process did not
permit enlarging the image when making a print from the negative. (The main type of printing out paper used wasalbumin paper.) To produce a large print, it was necessary to use a large negative of the desired size. The camera inwhich that negative would be inserted to take the photograph would also have to be large, in proportion to the size ofthe negative.
Thus, the labor required to acquire an optical image with photography today and with early period photography
was overwhelmingly different. Even so, since the government and society at large had recognized the utility ofphotography, photographers were able to carry on their work as professionals. Even though photographs could only
be produced by specialists and were costly in terms of the physical labor required, the desire for them was strong.
Because they were so highly valued, those early photographs have been handed down to later generations so that we
can now see them. Early photographs are not important just their content, images that capture the irreversible culturechanges that have transformed our world over the past century and a half. They are also significant as photographsthat we can experience as objects. We can appreciate these images without the intervention of any equipment, and that
directness communicates their significance to people over the generations, in an ongoing tradition.

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4

In the Japanese version of the exhibition title, はこだて , the hiragana version of Hakodate is used, since different sets of charactershave been used for it: 箱館 in the closing years of the Edo period and the early Meiji period and 函館 thereafter. The Kaikakushi Jigyo
Hokoku, 1 (Report of the Development Commission programs, 1; Ministry of Finance, 1885) states that the “our commission’s office
was established there in 1869 and the name was changed from 箱館 to 函館 ” (p. 18). The offical government journal, the Dajokan
Nisshi, however, continued to mingle the two versions until 1876. While the name change dates to 1869, when it was fully established
is unclear. It is, however, a fact that the name was changed to 函館 as part of Japan’s modernization.
The “photography museum” referred to is not our museum but the Tsukuba Photography Museum, which was opened for alimited period, from March 9 to September 16, 1985. Kaneko Ryuchi, who made enormous contributions to the founding andoperation of the Tokyo Museum of Photographic Art, died on June 20, 2021.
“Photographs from the dawn of photography” refer, in the case of photographs in Japan, to photographs from the 1850s
through the Meiji period (1868-1912). The term “old photographs” is also used, but the time period it refers to is unclear. In
this essay, therefore, I use “photographs from the dawn.” For further information, see Between Image and Object: Dawn of JapanesePhotography—Hokkaido and Tohoku (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2012).
The phrase “digital transformation” is usually used of business enterprises. I use it here to refer not only to the transformationfrom analog to digital formats but to the revolutions in processes, cultures, and social environments that have accompanied thattransformation.
Because the number of works that could be displayed at each exhibition was limited, many rare and valuable works notexhibited. Thus, starting in 2020, we have continued to display them with the Geneses of Photography in Japan series.
Yokohama City collection, designated in 2006.
This group of photographs was rediscovered in the course of carrying out surveys for the History of Japanese Photographic Expression
in the Past 100 Years exhibition (organized by the Japan Professional Photographers Society; held in Seibu department stores) andattracted great interest. The term refers to documentary photographs of areas being developed, including Sapporo, Asahikawa,and Muroran. Source: Japan Professional Photographers Society, ed., Nihon Shashinshi 1840-1945 [History of Japanesephotography, 1840-1945] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971),
The year 1839 corresponds to the eleventh month of Tempo 9 to the tenth month of Tempo 10.
The Morrison, an American ship with several shipwrecked Japanese it had rescued on board, was fired upon by the shogunate
forces when it attempted to approach the coast of Japan.
Shoko Shuseikan collection; designated in 1999.
For more information on Shimooka Renjo, see Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, ed. Shimooka Renjo: A Pioneer ofJapanese Photography (Kokusho Kankokai, 2014).
The differences between the photographic techniques that reached Japan from Western Europe and the United States and from
Easter Eruope are not clear. Since they were based on chemistry, they were clearly influenced by their environments. We hope
to conduct further research from this perspective.
Sato Seiichi, Hakodate shashin no hajimari (The origins of Hakodate photography) (Goryokaku Tower, 1999).
See Chapter 2 in this volume, p. 40.
See Chapter 2 in this volume, p. 43.
Luke Gartlan, A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography (Leiden – Boston, 2016).
For more information about Noguchi Gennosuke, see the essay by Ohtsuka Kazuyoshi.

Geneses of Photography in Japan: Hakodate

Mitsui Keishi