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A few nice all in one printing images I found:

BRINKLEY’S 1897, 12-Volume EMPEROR’S Edition of JAPAN: DESCRIBED AND ILLUSTRATED BY THE JAPANESE — Published by the J. B. MILLET COMPANY


Image by Okinawa Soba
The 10 and 12-Volume FOLIO-SIZED "BRINKLEY SETS" OF 1897

Although most Brinkley Sets are comprised of 10 volumes, some (such as the set pictured) consisted of 12 volumes.The subscribers, whose names were printed in the books, had to wait a a few years for the last two ART volumes to appear. The personal inscriptions matched the first 10 volumes, but the contents were devoid of hand tinted photographs. Instead, they were illustrated with numerous tipped in halftone gravures depicting works of art, done up in various shades of ink printed on various tissue papers. Those interested in the photographic portion of the Brinkley Sets need only concern themselves with the first ten volumes.

[NOTE: This caption will probably appeal to dealers, collectors, and researchers who have a set of these books---or even some loose volumes---and want to know more about them].

►►► THE FINEST REAL-PHOTO-ILLUSTRATED PUBLICATION EVER MADE

The above photo shows the finest of the many Brinkley editions published by the J. B. MILLET COMPANY of Boston. Beside the English text translated from articles written by the Japanese themselves, there are over 300 hand-finished illustrations. These labor-intensive embellishments consist of 260 hand-tinted real albumen photographs, 10 beautiful flower collotypes, and over 30 other works of art inserted among the pages — and that’s just the first 10 volumes !

Of all the Editions containing real photos, the EMPEROR’S EDITION averaged the best photographic content in terms of richness of the prints, and quality of hand tinting. Although other Editions occasionally had scattered prints that exceeded the quality of particular images in the EMPEROR’S EDITION, among the numerous sets collated, the EMPEROR’S EDITION always had at least 75% of its photographic content exceed the quality of the next best Edition (such as the MIKADO, EMPRESS, YEDO, DeLUXE, and other numerous editions).

Back in 1991, DENISE BETHEL of Sotheby’s Auction House in New York published what remains the best description of these sets ever written. Her 20-page report appeared in the VOLUME 34, NOS. 1-2, Spring/Summer issue of IMAGE magazine published by the GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

However, a typo slipped in resulting in the pictured EMPEROR’S EDITION getting demoted to a "lesser" quality edition. In spite of that, Bethel’s work is still an amazing read on how the above volumes packed with real photos and art came into being — and how (and why) the publishing world has never been able to repeat such a thing to this day.

While Ms. BETHEL’S highly detailed essay focused mainly in the business side of getting this major work published, the Okinawa_Soba caption below deals with new information that has come to light during the past 20 years — especially information of a photographic nature.

To begin with, we now know that Yokohama photographer KOZABURO TAMAMURA was the one charged with coming up with a mountain of hand finished photographs to be pasted into the volumes of these silk-covered sets, and he called upon his Japanese photographer friends and acquaintances to bail him out !

His first order from the Boston publisher called for over 180,000 prints !!!!! This unbelievable order for photographs was so astounding, it made news in the Japanese papers of the day.

But, that was only the beginning.

Some sources have said this order was eventually increased to 1,000,000 hand-colored prints — all for the same publisher ! Although I have not been able to track the "million" number down to a primary source, I have made some basic calculations based on Bethel’s list of editions of this set (and some not on her list), and came up with way more than double the first installment of 180,000 prints — actually well over 400,000 hand-made albumen photos (just for starters) !

There were also numerous editions that have no press-run figures, and the published also issued ART FOLIO sets that were filled with nothing but loose, mounted prints.

Although an accurate final figure might be impossible to obtain, the numbers so far certainly indicate the incredible amount of early Japanese photographs that came out of Yokohama during the 19th century.

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TAMAMURA GETS SWAMPED

Tamamura had not been a student of K. Ogawa as Enami had been, yet he was drawn into their profession circle, and, like Enami, maintained a close and friendly relationship with Ogawa — and apparently the illustrious Kimbei Kusakabe as well.

The camera craft of these four men would occasionally be found together in both domestic and international works of photographic art — the most well known being the multi-volume Brinkley sets under discussion here.

In these large folio volumes seen in the photo above, it is unfortunate that only K. Ogawa is given distinct credit for his photographic contributions — the beautifully colored collotype frontispiece images of flowers.

However, it was the unnamed Tamamura who was responsible for organizing the effort to edit and supply the proverbial one million (!) hand-colored albumen photos, all to be used over a several-year period as tipped-in illustrations for the body of the various Brinkley editions — the better ones requiring 260 of these real photos to be pasted in by hand.

Tamamura needed help from the better-known photographers mentioned above to supply other images in addition to his own. In the end, not only were these other photographers called on, but also a staff of over 350 sun-printers and colorists was hired on and kept busy at the studios — and no doubt at make-shift workshops set up for the occasion.

Although we know that K. Ogawa, Tamamura, Kimbei (and surely others) provided images, I will focus on T. ENAMI’S photographs for the moment….

Enami’s photographs form a substantial part of both the larger matted images, as well as the smaller views pasted directly onto the text pages. Interestingly, the leading full-size matted photograph in all of the sets — the volume-one scene of Mt. Fuji with boaters in the foreground — is by T. Enami, being one of his earliest 1892-95 images (View no.310 in Enami’s Print and Lantern-Slide Catalog)

Here it is, showing part of the green paper mount :

www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/2723925755/

Interestingly, Denise Bethel’s 1991 article in IMAGE Magazine (described in the first caption section above) also utilized an Enami photograph for one of the four full-page illustrations. Although it appears as a black & white illustration in IMAGE, you may see it here in full color :

www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/3604981064/

On a technical note, although there were many "Editions" produced by the publisher, the "better sets" all contained 60 large, hand-tinted and matted albumen prints such as the Mt. Fuji scene above, and 200 smaller "postcard" size, hand-tinted albumen prints tipped into spaces prepared for them on the printed text pages. However, during production of the sets, many images were "switched out" using photos made from both (1) close variants, and (2) totally different negatives having content that conformed to the fixed captions already pre-printed on the pages.

Except for only one paragraph in the Introduction that was altered between many of the editions, the main body of the text was printed from the same page blocks for all of the editions. For the cheaper halftone editions, only the captions were changed, and halftone photos were placed within the same spot that had been formerly left blank in the better editions to allow for the pasting in of the hand-colored, albumen photographs.

I have personally seen and collated the hand-tinted albumen images in about ten different complete sets (and there are many more Editions that I have not examined). Making comparisons where I could, I discovered that 333 different negatives were variously used to fill the 260 positions reserved for the photographic illustrations in the best editions.

However, if we include the 192 new photographs (out of 198 total) used to make the black and white half-tone illustrations for the cheaper editions, the total image stock used by the publisher rises to 530 photos !

These numbers can only be expected to grow as more sets are carefully compared.

To date, almost 50 of these large and small images have been identified as those from the studio of T. ENAMI, making his work the largest body of verified, photographer-attributed images in the "Brinkley sets". This number is also expected to rise as more of Enami’s verified images become available to match with the Brinkley content.

As work is now in progress to nail down as many KIMBEI and TAMAMURA images as possible (many are already known in these sets), a clearer picture of the photographic talent behind the Brinkley JAPAN sets will finally emerge — after over 110 years.

FINALLY…. in my personal opinion, the pressure put upon these great photographers to come up with so many photographs in so short a time caused quality to suffer — in all areas of printing, fixing, washing, and tinting. Although there are still fine examples of richly printed and tinted images that have survived well in the books, a great number of images have begun to show the effects of time, and fading of many of the prints has resulted in the less-than-careful tinting now standing out in a distracting way against badly-fading prints whose former richness helped swallow up the too-quick (and sometimes too sloppy) application of color.

Strangely, it is the 200 or so black & white half-tones of the lesser editions that remain universally rich in contrast, showing us what the negatives and albumen prints they worked from 110 years ago really looked like — all rich and spectacular.

For more on ENAMI, TAMAMURA, and the BRINKLEY Sets of Old Japan (along with more samples of Enami’s photography contained in the sets), scroll halfway down the page until you hit the BRINKLEY section here : www.t-enami.org/services

For a sampling of about 60 images from across a range of the various Brinkley sets, see : www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/sets/72157623291386044/

Plenty more Enami pics HERE : www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/collections/7215761388…

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RANDOM SOBA : www.flickriver.com/photos/24443965@N08/random/

A JAPANESE SUSPENSION BRIDGE — A Rough Start at Trying to Copy Western Engineering — and how They Beat Us in the End


Image by Okinawa Soba
NOTE: The following RANT is brought to you by TIME SLIP ARCHIVES, and has been partially proofread by NEMO’S GREAT UNCLE (who is not responsible for the content) — although some of his technically accurate recommendations have been vetoed in favor of retaining my fiat flickr idiosyncrasies of non-standard punctuation and grammatical style.

I will let you Civil Engineering students check in with your opinions on the various features and level of efficacy on this attempt by early Japanese engineers to copy what they THOUGHT they saw in Western illustrations — and what they THOUGHT would be an improvement over the masonry and steel-cabled masterpieces already found in England and North America.

FIRST OFF, the Japanese are great bridge builders, and always have been. The stone arch type goes way back in Japan. However, the FIRST and BEST builders of the most substantial types of the stone arch bridges in what is now Japan were the more scientifically and culturally advanced OKINAWANS to the south, who understood correct methods of bridge and road building long before the mainland Japanese did.

In fact, in the 21st Century, the oldest surviving example of a stone arch bridge in Japan is on the island of Miyako in Okinawa Prefecture. During WW2, on the main island of Okinawa, long lines of America’s stoutest tanks rolled across such bridges built by the Okinawans 100s of years ago, without so much as a whisper out of the rock and road beds high above the streams and rivers. However, the Sea-Bees moved in quickly, demolishing as much of this ancient history as possible, and replaced them with temporary "Bailey Bridges".

But now I digress to another subject, discussing certain tendencies of Okinawa’s neighbors to the north, and called by them, "The YAMATUU" — or, as we call them in English, "The Japanese"

In the bridge before us, the Japanese builders saw no need for such things as frivolous ANCHOR CABLES beyond the two end towers (which here look more like modified Torii Gates ripped off from a local Shrine entrance), and figured out that the best way to go was making as many towers as possible along the road bed, and cross-suspend the loads via a cable-sharing network anchored to all of the towers in the middle of the bridge — all in mid air !

This bridge might have been the only wacky one in all of Japan at the time, with all the rest being completely fine. But, the photo reminds me of the MODERN DAY civil engineering crews that come down from TOKYO to build roads and bridges on OKINAWA (whose inhabitants used to build their OWN far more excellent roads and bridges). Many times, the results are NOT a pretty sight, and the mainland Japanese have (on many occasions) had to dig up their sloppy work, and start over again !!!

In any case, this attempted "pulling the road bed up by its own boot-straps" (so to speak) type of engineering indicates one possible reason the Japanese kept coming back to Europe and North America for continuing instruction on how to make just about ANYTHING during both the MEIJI and TAISHO eras of of pre-WW2 industrial growth.

Some Japanophiles like to complain when folks like me start in with the "JAPAN JUST COPIES EVERYTHING" rants that have become stereotypical of those wannabe pundits not really familiar with Japan at all. HOWEVER, once you DO become deeply familiar with Japan, and spend years working with them (and for them) on any number of projects, you begin to understand that the stereotyping is actually TRUE, and that……JAPAN JUST COPIES EVERYTHING !!!

Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. However, the problem is that while doing so, they have a political, educational, and bureaucratic tendency to DENY the roots and sources of all technological advances they enjoy as a nation today. Even more insidious is the fact that their political position is to look down on CHINA and KOREA, the two countries that pretty much gave Japan the base of much of their arts, culture, and written language. After calling yourself the "Supreme Race" for so long, I suppose it’s hard to give credit where credit is due.

Speaking of "Races" there is not one iota of racisim in this caption — just straight, unbiased observation. The problem here is CULTURE, not "race". Japan’s own educational broadcasting system( NHK) once estimated (in a program I saw with my own eyes) that that "free thinking and creative" Japanese in Japan run about 2 % of their population — as compared to 60 % of Western societies. 2% vs 60 % ! NHK’s words, not mine.

However, when you move the Japanese to a Western environment, their creativity and inventiveness moves right up the scale to match their Western counterparts. Conversely, take a 4.0 grade average blond -haired, blue-eyed Western babe with hopes, dreams and ambitions, send her to Japan, and within no time, Japan’s patriarchal society will have her in a bar pouring drinks for the local truck drivers and bureaucrats — and while taking the train home, she runs a good chance of having to fend off gropers and up-skirt camera guys. I have witnessed that exact thing on numerous occasions….AND have heard the complaints directly from Western women living in Japan. Again, these are not racial issues, but ones of CULTURE , EDUCATION, and ENVIRONMENT.

Other Little things resulting from "CULTURAL BRAIN BLOCKAGE"……

As photographer, I know that the entire combined brains of the entire nation of Japan could not make any decent camera lenses until opticians from GERMANY came over in the 20th Century, and spent a long time trying to get it through their heads. The result of that tutelage was the folks who brought you your NIKON CAMERA ! Most of the world’s finest cameras are now made by the highly skilled Japanese.

As a driver who loved my many TOYOTA cars over the years, it should be remembered that the Japanese could not figure out how to make an automobile no matter how long they banged their head against the wall. They finally decided to buy ONE Chevrolet from the USA, take it apart piece by piece, and COPY it down to a gnats eyelash in order to get things finally going at TOYOTA. Most of the world’s finest cars are now made by the highly skilled Japanese.

When America first introduced Trains to Japan, the Shogunate Government told America, "NO THANK YOU, Trains will never work in Japan". Now look at Japan’s rail system…and look at America’s. Most of the world’s finest finest trains and tunnel engineering are now provided by the highly skilled Japanese.

And we all know that "Made in China" or "Made in Japan" does NOT mean "Invented, Created, Designed and Engineered" in those places. For example, the West will spend 5 years and Billions of Dollars to come up with some new gizmoe, or a cure for some Childhood Disease — and then Japan, China, or Taiwan will then COPY it in 18 days.

By the way, the patriarchal Japanese government would not allow Japanese women to have BIRTH CONTROL PILLS for over 40 years. But as soon as Pfizer came up with VIAGRA, they rammed that one through their Parliament in record time for any drug known.

query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE3D8163DF934A…

There are a million stories like this about Japan and Asia, and the apprehension of their corporate spies is never-ending, which makes them appear totally incapable of figuring out any BASIC mechanical, chemical, or Biological advancements….even if their lived depended on it.

Here in Japan, the Japanese corporate definition of "Research & Development" meant only TWO THINGS :

(1) Spend all of your time translating FRENCH, GERMAN, and ENGLISH Trade Journals on the latest Chemical, Biological, Material, and Scientific Engineering discoveries and processes — in order that the Japanese themselves would NOT HAVE TO DO ANY BASIC RESEARCH. This allowed them to jump right in, having a "FREE LUNCH" on the back of the Western world’s massive investments, expenditures, and hard work in the area of fundamental research.

and

(2) Buy up as many Western patents and proprietary technologies as possible, and manufacture all under a Japanese name.

NOW….the irony in all of this is that the Japanese (as well as the Taiwanese, and now the Chinese) are doing most of the manufacturing of all that Western science and technology HANDED TO THEM ON A PLATTER, while the Western culture of Science, Intellect, Investigation, Logic, and Analytical Thinking is in danger of no longer knowing how to manufacture anything as a society at large.

Even though there are some bright exceptions to the Western manufacturing base, these days, they are too busy being "Politically Correct" and doing things like allowing Saudi Arabia to finance the construction of MOSQUES in their lands, while being prohibited from building Christian CHURCHES in Saudi Arabia.

I’m passing through Pennsylvania now, looking around. The Cities there used to conceive of, engineer, and manufacture everything for themselves and the world. Even the Golden Gate Bridge (ahhhh, another suspension bridge) was built in Pennsylvania, and then shipped by rail in pieces to San Francisco. The countries of the West once knew how to make their own stuff — from toys to telescopes to towering skyscrapers, and of course, bridges.

Now….. America is fast becoming a country of "dropouts". Educational levels continue to drop, while fat levels continue to rise — the gross weight of shoppers at Malls and Wal*Mart possibly exceeding the combined gross weight of all National Geographic Magazines printed during the past 120 years.

Graffiti covers the derelict corpses of the old factories and forges of a once-proud manufacturing base. Basic human and corporate greed seems to have given it all away — trading knowledge, pride, and national ability for the almighty Buck….and some computer games.

Of course, America HAS retained the ability to spend billions of Dollars to bomb other countries better than anyone else, while its own school buildings within range of the Capitol Building and the White House continue to crumble via gross neglect.

And…..it was nice knowing you, General Motors.

On the other hand, those who COPY now work hard and prosper at it.

And how RIDICULOUS it is that, after the West has moved all of it’s smokey, polluting factories to China to take advantage of the cheap labor there, that the West constantly complains about China’s smokey, polluting factories. Wake up, you loonies ! Those are your own AMERICAN and EUROPEAN factories in China ! (Duh !)

By the way, that silly Japanese suspension bridge in the above photo was only a temporary gaff. Like many other modern-day trades, concepts, skills, material science, and manufacturing techniques, they eventually GOT IT RIGHT.

However, in doing so, they built up an educational system that produced a society of worker bees incapable of much independent thought and invention (compared to Western cultural models). Japan, while unable to recover even 20 years after their economic bubble burst, continues to be maintained by a culture that tends to crush any such independent or creativity in the cases where it did appear.

That means that the 10% – 15% of Japanese society that makes the Cars, Cameras, and Electronics the world likes so much continues to subsidize the rest of the nation whose productivity has, like the rest of the West, gone to China. And now, even Japan is having it’s own consumer goods made in China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.

On several occasions, I have called Japanese companies to express my praise of any of their product designs or "breakthroughs". The response is usually something like this : "Oh, that was designed in America….discovered in England….engineered in Germany…" etc. Of course, none of that is on the box.

If the West is not careful, everything they have — the ability to think, reason, analyze, create, and invent the systems, concepts, and tools the world copies — all of it will be squandered. It twill wind up as a tangled mess, just like that Suspension bridge in the old photo above . Then, those that appropriated the West’s hard earned knowledge in exchange for Oil, Money, and cheaply priced goods will be laughing……even as they head to the nearest bank.

In the end, the COPYCAT NATIONS, COUNTERFEITERS, and COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS will own the West like a farmer owns a cow — milking it for for the ideas to keep its engines running, while throwing a bucket of oats in our socially decaying barn.

By the way, I ran this rant by a pretty Geisha in Tokyo, and here’s the effect it had : www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/2701942219/

PS. Yes, I am aware of all of the holes in the above diatribe. A rant without holes in it wouldn’t be a rant ! Also, did you really read this far ??? Thank God this is only a cheap flickr caption, and NOT an international white paper with foot notes. I’d be canned before I got out the door.

Next Photo Please !