Photographs of 19th Century Japan

Personal and Architectural Connections

• Several commenters work or live in old Kyoto machiya and note how few remain, with many replaced by generic apartments.
• Traditional houses are praised as beautiful but criticized as expensive, labor-intensive, and poorly insulated; people discuss mixing modern construction with traditional aesthetics.

Life Then vs Now

• Photos provoke “what did we do to our world?” reactions; some see modernity as morally similar or worse (war, nationalism, racism, shallow information, low statistical literacy).
• Others strongly prefer today’s comforts: insulation, climate control, easy transport, and better life prospects for ordinary people.
• There’s an expectation that in 150 years, people will nostalgically view our own era’s images the same way.

How Representative Are These Photos?

• Multiple comments stress these are staged, idealized scenes made for foreign buyers—more like tourist images than documentary street life.
• The “letter carrier” is identified as a reconstruction of a courier type that had already disappeared, designed to satisfy Western demand for “authentic” Japan.
• One thread debates whether these show “regular people” or mostly picturesque exceptions, noting that photography then was too costly for everyday snapshots.

Coloring, Quality, and Archival Projects

• It’s clarified these are black-and-white photos hand-colored (or dyed) by artists; some colors (e.g., monks’ robes) may be inaccurate given conflicting colorized versions.
• Commenters are impressed by the resolution and tonal detail of large-format film compared to later cheap 35mm.
• Links are shared to other 19th–early 20th c. photo collections and a new object-detection–based site for Japanese photos, along with frustrations about access and UX of institutional archives.

Culture, Globalization, and Authenticity

• Debate over whether globalization is destroying or enriching cultures:
  • One camp laments loss of local traditions and “authenticity,” blaming multinationals and cultural homogenization.
  • Others argue cultures have always mixed (via empires, religions, trade) and that remixing creates new diversity.
• Discussion veers into how to “defend” local cultures, the role of immigrants, and whether Japan’s cultural conservatism and language barrier limit outside influence.

What Remains & Sense of Time

• Many note specific locations (Nikkō, Kamakura’s Great Buddha, parts of Kyoto, Osaka Castle’s exterior, sumo) that still visually resemble the photos, while most historic towns are gone.
• Firebombing and atomic bombing are cited for the complete transformation of some cities; Kyoto became a concrete city except for a few preserved, now-touristy districts.
• Commenters are struck by the mortality of everyone pictured and by the continuity of human hopes; others compare living through the PC–smartphone–LLM era to people who spanned feudal Japan to mid-20th-century modernity.