* Wysteria Vine.
It is not written, but I am pretty sure it's Kameido Shrine.
You need to come at the right time to see flowers like that though.
* Nikko
All pictures that show shrine and pagoda
* Osaka Castle
* Daibutsu, at Kamakura
* Jinrikishia
Now it's for tourists, but you can ride in Asakusa.
* View Ojigoku on Great Boiling Springs, Hakone.
* Wrestlers.
Sumo still exists and looks like that.
* Gion Machi Street, at Kyoto.
Looks a bit different, but there are still many old houses like this.
* View of Nara.
* Tennojo Buddhist Temple
* Hakone Lake of Fujiyama
What does not exist anymore is any picture showing a town or village.
I feel sad about this. There are a very few places that kept this (E.g. Shirakawago).
Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.
ekianjo 23 minutes ago [-]
Osaka Castle is a reconstruction. It's an empty shell, almost like a movie decor at this stage. If you want to see a real castle, there's the Himeji castle not too far from there.
canpan 3 minutes ago [-]
You are absolutely right. The inside of Osaka castle is now concrete or something. But the outside and castle grounds still look like the article picture.
Himeji castle is a great recommendation.
imp0cat 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Nikko still looks pretty much the same, just with a lot more people.
hoseyor 6 hours ago [-]
This reminds me that we are all losing our unique and diverse cultures and humanity through the incessant drive of globalist world domination to force everyone to do and be the same, while “diversity is our greatest strength” is piped over the megaphones, as diversity is crushed under corporate consolidation
autoexec 6 hours ago [-]
> This reminds me that we are all losing our unique and diverse cultures and humanity through the incessant drive of globalist world domination to force everyone to do and be the same
We're actually creating new unique and diverse cultures by adopting and remixing parts of the various cultures we encounter. Just looking at photos from other cultures (as you have done today) is a part of that process. This is a good thing. Some of my favorite things are different takes on a thing that came from another culture. Diversity really does make us stronger and it makes our lives richer. While it might be neat to see what results from cultures being totally isolated, I think it'd be much more interesting to see what results from bringing those cultures together.
The truth is that none of those "unique and diverse cultures" you're mourning the loss of came from anything different. Even japan's culture, although it was one of the more isolationist nations, was still massively influenced by other people/places. Technology accelerates the process, but the process itself is unchanged. It made 19th century japan what it was then, just like it made japan what it is now. It's just what humans do and always have done. There's no reason to feel sad about it.
woolion 1 hours ago [-]
Your comments reminds me one time I discussed with a university professor about how evil the eradication of the biosphere diversity was (wildlife but also unique breeds with century-long histories), and he replied that we'd have a "less bloated, more efficient biosphere".
RataNova 1 hours ago [-]
Cultures evolve, borrow, remix - that's always been true, even long before globalization. People still find ways to hold onto local traditions, stories, food, language - sometimes because the outside world feels so loud.
tokioyoyo 5 hours ago [-]
You’re really underplaying how awful the life was for an average person in before-times. Sure, pretty buildings, different cultures, and etc. were more prominent. But also an average person would never be able to enjoy those in their lifetimes.
Cthulhu_ 1 hours ago [-]
Not unlike how it went in a lot of places at the time; the problem with history is that they mainly focus on and make records of the upper echelons, the pretty parts. Few historians / writers / etc make notes of the common people. Some exceptions, of course, but you'd be forgiven for thinking Europe was mainly castles, knights and political intrigue back in the middle ages.
It hasn't changed much; in theory everyone has a camera in their pocket now to record the mundane, but in practice a lot of it is "content", where people put on a show for the camera.
My grandpa was an amateur photographer, he'd go out and make photos of local events, scenes, people, etc. His work has been donated to a regional museum and digitized, because there was little other visual records of these old (well, 50's) traditions.
I can't find them though. Some were uploaded to a Facebook page but that's a really poor platform for archiving / displaying works. I should reach out to my dad and start a project to build a website for this collection or something like that.
Cthulhu_ 1 hours ago [-]
This is kind of an ironic comment as Japan was very isolationist - that is, resisting foreign influence, sticking to their own culture / traditions / etc - at least up until the time period of this photo, which is when the Meiji Restoration started and they opened up more to foreigners.
Corporations are probably low down the list of drivers of cultural homogenization. Merely exporting (via social media, entertainment, cosmopolitan norms, etc) the Western conception of diversity as virtue, as well as the particular definition(s) du jour of diversity, is no less a form of cultural homogenization (or "colonization" using the parlance of some circles).
i_v 4 hours ago [-]
I just don't think that's true. This seems like a really pessimistic take. Is it truly "globalist world domination" — implying that our corporate overlords want us to live like this? Or is it purely function and aesthetic? Capitalism puts power in the hands of consumers—sure, marketing has an influence—but also, we as consumers are the ultimate deciders. Cost, labor, and wealth. All are influences in the deciding of what we choose to buy. If what we have today is lifeless, I think it's of our own collective choosing.
To be fair though, these photos are breathtaking. Pre-industrial era Japan is a place I'd love to visit and the history of this transformation is steeped in fear, modernizing in response to Western powers (look up Matthew Perry—naval officer, not the actor lol).
xandrius 11 hours ago [-]
And this stuff is why I love either super creative science fiction or travelogues (and the formers are hard to find).
You can try to imagine a brand new world or simply try to re-live our real and past world. To me that is even more amazing, as it often can be the door to understanding some things of today's cultures and/or discover lost little worlds.
Currently I'm going through this book of a guy who cycled across Central Asia and in Japan. The guy is sometimes quite direct in his writing (unlike other writers) but it's so interesting to experience the world of just 100-200 years ago through the lens of one living there. I truly recommend it.
Cthulhu_ 1 hours ago [-]
Some video games try and do the former; I play too much FFXIV and a recurring theme there is that you go to a new area and you get the tourist's experience, tour the area, view the sights, meet the locals, figure out the local history and culture, etc.
Sure, it's kind of superficial, usually based on human civilizations / design trends / etc; that is:
* Heavensward: Europe / traditional knights and castles and church stuffs
* Stormblood: East-Asia / Japan, clearly a favorite thing to work on from the developers
* Shadowbringers: is actually pretty independent
* Endwalker: Rome / Greece on the one side, India on the other, philosophical existential crises in the late game (that part is actually really good, they invented multiple (7-8 or so?) different civilizations who all achieved some kind of immortality and pursued the meaning of life, ending up disillusioned)
* Dawntrail (latest): south & mesoamerica on the one side, cyberpunk sci-fi on the other
xandrius 59 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I saw that concept but I always feel like I'm supposed to be 6 years old to enjoy the interactions and the dialogue (both in FFXIV and FFXV). Also the "tourist moment" felt too much the canned tourist experience where everything is perfect, clean and everyone nice.
Instead travelogues are not that, they are not about being perfect or beautiful, it's about the places and people being as they are, however they are.
Didn't try all ths games you mentioned, I will take a look. Thanks!
decimalenough 9 hours ago [-]
Can you share the name & author of the book?
I'll plug Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands as an extraordinary deep dive into a world that's entirely disappeared in our lifetimes:
Is it "Around the world on a bicycle"? I, too, would like to know the name of this book. Sounds interesting!
xandrius 57 minutes ago [-]
Thomas Stevens, really an interesting character. He sometimes makes sweeping generalisations, which makes his writing even more real and not filtered.
decimalenough 9 hours ago [-]
Having visited last year, the scenery around Toshogu Shrine in Nikko isn't all that different, if you manage to visit like we did first thing in the morning as soon as they open and before the tour buses rock up. (The shrine is surrounded by acres of sacred forest where construction is prohibited.)
The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
ekianjo 16 minutes ago [-]
> The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
getting utterly destroyed by fire bombing (or atomic bombs in the case of Nagasaki) does that to cities.
RataNova 1 hours ago [-]
Nikko really does feel like stepping back in time if you catch it early enough
NKosmatos 43 minutes ago [-]
It would be great if there were photos of today for some of these old photos, especially for structures/places/scenery that still exists.
kappasan 13 hours ago [-]
Cool photos! My workplace is an old machiya [1] in Kyoto that's more than a hundred years old, so I kinda live like the people in these photos (not really of course - no konbini back then).
A friend of mine also recently redid a machiya in Kyoto. It even had the godness mask near the ceiling, amazing.
Side note: I quickly checked the dedede project and I'm so enthralled with it! I will use it to improve my Japanese, thank you!
kappasan 11 hours ago [-]
Thanks so much for checking out the website! I hear machiya are quickly disappearing in Kyoto (often turned into generic apartments) so it's great to hear your friend is keeping the old city alive.
potato3732842 11 hours ago [-]
It's amazing to see pictures of feudal japan and think that some of the people who grew up there would be alive in the 1950s. Talk about witnessing progress.
radpanda 8 hours ago [-]
That’s how I feel about present day humanity with regards to computer tech. I was born around the time of the 8086; my parents never really became fluent with computers. I was a nerd and got into computers as a teen, soon enough I had internet and then WiFi and now frickin smartphones hooked into LLMs. We’re the Information Age equivalent of those folks who spanned all the from the feudal era to riding Honda motorbikes.
prawn 5 hours ago [-]
I'm possibly a similar vintage and enjoy telling my kids about changes that have happened within my lifetime, and not just things I've read of. TVs without remotes, to corded remotes, to normal remotes, all-in-one things, remotes with touch pads, everyone watching shows on personal devices with touchscreens, etc. Or from rotary phones to corded to cordless to early mobile phones, to what they're familiar with now. Record players, rewinding cassette tapes with a pencil, recording songs from radio, carrying around CDs with your Discman, minidiscs, MP3s, streaming. Such an interesting and wide series of changes.
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
trhway 10 hours ago [-]
Keiko Fukuda, a judo trainer (10th degree black belt) in SF who died in 2013 aged 99 (she taught in her dojo in Noe Valley even into the last year of her life) was the student of the judo founder Kano Jigoro who opened his first judo school in 1882.
It looks like the other blog post linked to about the photos of the Russian Empire is behind a paywall, but the original Prokudin-Gorskii collection is available for free at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/prokudin-gorskii/about-this-...
Unlike these photographs from Japan, the ones from the Russian Empire were made with colored photographic plates and they were reassembled into true color photos and restored in the last few decades.
Sadly the photos from the Monsen American west collection seem to be guarded closely by Princeton and are not viewable to the public without requesting physical access. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/C1539
There was nothing to do back then. And if there was, it was crazy and/or reserved for the feudal lords. The primary income of the state was through alcohol taxes. Countries thought it was okay to invade other countries just to make themselves bigger/stronger countries. Nationalism, racism, sexism were the norm. Most people can't read/write. Information is scant and passed on by word of mouth.
qiqitori 3 hours ago [-]
(Re-reading what I wrote above, I'd like to clarify that all the stuff I wrote above (except perhaps the alcohol tax one?) is of course not specific to Japan.)
Cthulhu_ 60 minutes ago [-]
In ~150 years someone will pick some photos taken today and post them and someone will probably wonder the same thing. Go out and do some sightseeing - a lot of the sights in these photos still exist, but also, you look at these photos with different eyes than the people that grew up there do; changing how you look at your own environment or places of interest will probably also help.
freetime2 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting, my reaction to these photos was "no thank you". It's fun to have a glimpse at the past, but I have no desire to live back then.
In particular I'm happy to live in a modern, well-insulated home with climate control. Transportation is also a lot more convenient with cars, trains, and airplanes. And clothing and fashion of the day also looks very uncomfortable to me.
Some of the nature scenes look lovely. But there are still plenty of places in Japan where you can experience the same sense of natural beauty and solitude.
dclowd9901 9 hours ago [-]
In some ways we made it better and in some ways we made it worse.
Lovely pictures, especially liked the one of the room with the carpet, tea set, and table at the window. Everything low on the floor.
mc3301 7 hours ago [-]
Lots and lots of Japanese homes and apartments are like this, today. "Floor life," I like to call it.
mongol 11 hours ago [-]
Goes without saying, all the people on these photos are now all dead. And their children too. Zooming in and studying their faces, it strikes me how similar we are to them, and yet so different.
Aeolun 9 hours ago [-]
We are not different. The world is. I guarantee you those people had the exact same hopes and dreams we have now.
DeathArrow 2 hours ago [-]
What amazes me is the quality of these pictures. Are they digitally restored?
ekianjo 19 minutes ago [-]
film photography had a lot more detail until we moved to cheap 35mm film for cost and convenience reasons. Even middle format has a huge effective resolution,
DeathArrow 2 hours ago [-]
>I’m once again struck by the fact that none of the people in these images are still with us. If any of them somehow returned to the land of the living, I’m not sure they’d recognise the Japan of today.
On the other hand, if someone sees one of this pictures without any explanation, he will recognize it's made in Japan.
I think Japan changed, but not so much.
Cthulhu_ 58 minutes ago [-]
Japan still is pretty isolationist or culturally conservative; I have no firsthand experience so this is all hearsay, but I gather the people living there are under a lot of societal / cultural pressure in how to behave, speak, live, etc. Foreigners get some leeway because they're foreign, but that's probably not so different wherever you go.
ekianjo 17 minutes ago [-]
> I think Japan changed, but not so much.
I have read a book written in the early 20th century by an American at that time who had spent most of his life in Japan and who described what life was life was in Japan at the time. If you remove the technological change, culturally and traditionally, Japan is pretty much the same country as several generations back, and I was struck by that.
bhaney 11 hours ago [-]
Nikkō Road seems like it would have flooding issues. I wonder how they avoided that.
srik 10 hours ago [-]
They’re lovely, thank you!
hermitcrab 11 hours ago [-]
What is the story of the 'letter carrier'?
Aloisius 4 hours ago [-]
It's a staged photograph by Kimbei Kusakabe (or Baron Raimund von Stillfried, they sold each other's works a lot and Kusakabe worked for Stillfried at one point) of hikyaku (express couriers) created to sate Western desire for souvenirs of "real" Japan.
They had long since disappeared by the time the photographs were taken, replaced with uniformed men on bicycles. In the past though, they ran express mail in relays with a partner who carried a torch.
BoingBoomTschak 10 hours ago [-]
He carried letters.
Rendered at 08:09:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
* Wysteria Vine. It is not written, but I am pretty sure it's Kameido Shrine. You need to come at the right time to see flowers like that though.
* Nikko All pictures that show shrine and pagoda
* Osaka Castle
* Daibutsu, at Kamakura
* Jinrikishia Now it's for tourists, but you can ride in Asakusa.
* View Ojigoku on Great Boiling Springs, Hakone.
* Wrestlers. Sumo still exists and looks like that.
* Gion Machi Street, at Kyoto. Looks a bit different, but there are still many old houses like this.
* View of Nara.
* Tennojo Buddhist Temple
* Hakone Lake of Fujiyama
What does not exist anymore is any picture showing a town or village. I feel sad about this. There are a very few places that kept this (E.g. Shirakawago). Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.
We're actually creating new unique and diverse cultures by adopting and remixing parts of the various cultures we encounter. Just looking at photos from other cultures (as you have done today) is a part of that process. This is a good thing. Some of my favorite things are different takes on a thing that came from another culture. Diversity really does make us stronger and it makes our lives richer. While it might be neat to see what results from cultures being totally isolated, I think it'd be much more interesting to see what results from bringing those cultures together.
The truth is that none of those "unique and diverse cultures" you're mourning the loss of came from anything different. Even japan's culture, although it was one of the more isolationist nations, was still massively influenced by other people/places. Technology accelerates the process, but the process itself is unchanged. It made 19th century japan what it was then, just like it made japan what it is now. It's just what humans do and always have done. There's no reason to feel sad about it.
It hasn't changed much; in theory everyone has a camera in their pocket now to record the mundane, but in practice a lot of it is "content", where people put on a show for the camera.
My grandpa was an amateur photographer, he'd go out and make photos of local events, scenes, people, etc. His work has been donated to a regional museum and digitized, because there was little other visual records of these old (well, 50's) traditions.
I can't find them though. Some were uploaded to a Facebook page but that's a really poor platform for archiving / displaying works. I should reach out to my dad and start a project to build a website for this collection or something like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration
To be fair though, these photos are breathtaking. Pre-industrial era Japan is a place I'd love to visit and the history of this transformation is steeped in fear, modernizing in response to Western powers (look up Matthew Perry—naval officer, not the actor lol).
You can try to imagine a brand new world or simply try to re-live our real and past world. To me that is even more amazing, as it often can be the door to understanding some things of today's cultures and/or discover lost little worlds.
Currently I'm going through this book of a guy who cycled across Central Asia and in Japan. The guy is sometimes quite direct in his writing (unlike other writers) but it's so interesting to experience the world of just 100-200 years ago through the lens of one living there. I truly recommend it.
Sure, it's kind of superficial, usually based on human civilizations / design trends / etc; that is:
* Heavensward: Europe / traditional knights and castles and church stuffs
* Stormblood: East-Asia / Japan, clearly a favorite thing to work on from the developers
* Shadowbringers: is actually pretty independent
* Endwalker: Rome / Greece on the one side, India on the other, philosophical existential crises in the late game (that part is actually really good, they invented multiple (7-8 or so?) different civilizations who all achieved some kind of immortality and pursued the meaning of life, ending up disillusioned)
* Dawntrail (latest): south & mesoamerica on the one side, cyberpunk sci-fi on the other
Instead travelogues are not that, they are not about being perfect or beautiful, it's about the places and people being as they are, however they are.
Didn't try all ths games you mentioned, I will take a look. Thanks!
I'll plug Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands as an extraordinary deep dive into a world that's entirely disappeared in our lifetimes:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/825419.Arabian_Sands
Both books (not just Japan, he cycled around the world): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1710
The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
getting utterly destroyed by fire bombing (or atomic bombs in the case of Nagasaki) does that to cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiya
Side note: I quickly checked the dedede project and I'm so enthralled with it! I will use it to improve my Japanese, thank you!
Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
Unlike these photographs from Japan, the ones from the Russian Empire were made with colored photographic plates and they were reassembled into true color photos and restored in the last few decades.
Sadly the photos from the Monsen American west collection seem to be guarded closely by Princeton and are not viewable to the public without requesting physical access. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/C1539
Edit: Looks like much of the Monsen Ethnographic Indian Photographs Portfolio can be found in the Huntington digital library: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll2/se... - content warning!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsujigiri
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NDL-DC_1301844_Toyoh...
In particular I'm happy to live in a modern, well-insulated home with climate control. Transportation is also a lot more convenient with cars, trains, and airplanes. And clothing and fashion of the day also looks very uncomfortable to me.
Some of the nature scenes look lovely. But there are still plenty of places in Japan where you can experience the same sense of natural beauty and solitude.
> They were originally shot in black and white, then hand-coloured by artists — a technique common at the time.
Here are some written accounts of Japan during that period:
https://www.gally.net/jatsi/index.html
On the other hand, if someone sees one of this pictures without any explanation, he will recognize it's made in Japan.
I think Japan changed, but not so much.
I have read a book written in the early 20th century by an American at that time who had spent most of his life in Japan and who described what life was life was in Japan at the time. If you remove the technological change, culturally and traditionally, Japan is pretty much the same country as several generations back, and I was struck by that.
They had long since disappeared by the time the photographs were taken, replaced with uniformed men on bicycles. In the past though, they ran express mail in relays with a partner who carried a torch.