Women Eating

The first camera entered Japan in 1848, but it was only after the establishment of diplomatic relations with western powers in the mid-1850s that photography spread as a commercial enterprise. Westerners and Japanese alike opened studios in port cities, where they hawked images of famous landmarks and “types” to tourists and a growing foreign population. These “types” accorded with western expectations of “authentic” Japanese clothing and customs that were often at odds with the contemporary government’s policy of rapid and wholesale modernization.