Foreign visitors were astounded with the work produced by these highly skilled artists. Yokohama's hand-colored photographs soon became a major tourist export item on par with pottery and lacquerware. Each little girl with a baby strapped on her back playing games utterly unconscious of the baby. When I saw this I knew why Japanese children didn't play with dolls. One rarely hears a baby cry in Japan or China and they attribute this to the happy cosy state a baby is in when she is snuggled close to mother, brother or sister.
Little boys act as nurses as well as sisters.
Up to the 1880s, the first tourist photographs were made from glass plate negatives produced by a troublesome method called the wet collodion process. The photographer had to coat a glass plate with a photosensitive liquid and the exposure had to be made within about twenty minutes while the photosensitive coating was still wet or sticky. After exposure, the wet plate had to be developed before it dried. Using wet plates required considerable technical skill and the photographer had to carry the chemicals and a lightproof box wherever he went to take photographs. The exposure time was about 15 seconds.