Fifty hand-tinted albumen photos ca. 9,1x13,8 cm (3 ½ x 5 ½ in) mounted on concertina style thick cardstock leaves. About four photos with English captions in negatives. Period black lacquered boards with elaborate inlaid floral motifs. Tissue papers occasionally preserved. Edges rubbed, several tissue papers with tears, photos slightly age-toned, but overall a very good album with strong, interesting photos.

A keepsake photo album with fifty excellent albumen prints produced in the Yokohama studio of Tamamura Kozaburo, in the late-19th century.

Tamamura Kozaburo was a pioneering Japanese photographer and a key figure in the development of Yokohama shashin, hand-colored photographs issued for foreign visitors during the Meiji period. Trained under Genzo Kanamaru, he opened his first studio in Asakusa in 1874 and moved to Yokohama in 1883. By the 1890s, his studio produced thousands of meticulously hand-colored albumen and collotype prints of Japanese life and customs, often compiled in elegant souvenir albums with lacquer covers.

The present album likely belonged to a foreign traveler or visitor to Japan, possibly a sailor, businessman, or tourist, who acquired it as a keepsake of their journey.

The collection contains fifty well-executed professional photographs of Japan, with twenty-five excellent prints likely depicting maikos from the world-famous No. 9 brothel in Yokohama. The brothel was immensely popular within Japanese and foreign visitors, remaining one of the city’s most renowned houses of prostitution until the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The photographs show maikos in traditional kimonos and hairdos holding Ichimatsu dolls, hand fans & musical instruments, posing by stone lanterns, flowers, seated, in groups, etc. The other twenty-five prints illustrate early Japanese landscapes, mostly showing pre-quake inns, native huts, teahouses, shrines, and ethnographical views in Southeastern and Southcentral parts of Honshu. The identified photographs portray Hakone (Fujiya Hotel, Hafuya Hotel, Fukuzumiro Ryokan), Yokohama (Zotokuin Temple), and Kamakura (Tsurugaoka Hachimango Shrine). Especially interesting are several photos of locals in kimonos busily walking down the streets, holding umbrellas, looking from the balconies, pulling rickshaws, etc. The collection also features about four prints from Kanazawa, including the now-destroyed Enosima Koen Hotel and the Yokosuka Shipyards along the coast of Tokyo Bay.

Overall, a beautiful souvenir photo album with fifty hand-colored albumen prints of Japanese landscapes and maikos, produced before the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.