New Discovery to be Announced Soon!

Plus: Help fund a larger free online photo archive

A photo from the 1910s of people in boats, on an idyllic pond filled with scarlet carps, and surrounded with romantic open teahouses and sheltering trees.

This spot lay close to what is today the world’s busiest train station, Shinjuku Station.

Three months ago I started researching four very rare images of this pond that I have in my collection. I thought it would be a quick job. How much could possibly have happened at a quiet pond in the countryside?

It turned out to be a spellbinding historical rabbit hole. My research has dug up new discoveries, including a find of hitherto unidentified early photos of this location from the 1860s that I hope to announce soon.

Within a few days I will start telling the story of this little known spot in installments. One article every three days or so.

It is really the story of Tokyo itself. I cannot think of any other place in Tokyo that inhabits such a representative historical space, yet is so little known.

Wait Less

I would like to thank you for waiting while I dug into this story. This wait was made longer because I had to work on unrelated projects to fund the research.

Several readers have advised me to start a funding campaign so that I can focus more on the research and archival work and there is less waiting.

Let me first explain what I am trying to accomplish with Old Photos of Japan. Many new readers have joined recently, and this will interest long-time readers too.

Who Am I?

My name is Kjeld (kyelt) Duits. I was born in the Netherlands, and arrived in Japan in 1982. Here I started a chain of language schools. After living through the 1995 quake that devastated Kobe I became a Japan Correspondent. Over almost three decades I covered most of the major earthquakes and natural disasters in Asia. I have been collecting and researching vintage images of Japan since 2007.

What do I do?

Old Photos of Japan is more than just a newsletter with rare vintage images about daily life in old Japan. It is a community project with three main activities:

1. Conserve Vintage Images

Since 2007 I have purchased 10,000 photographs, negatives, slides, postcards, woodblock prints of Japan between the 1850s and 1960s, as well as newspapers, art prints, maps, etc. I have also received some 60,000 scans of vintage images from other collectors. All images are themed around daily life and street views.

Vintage photos of Japan, and an old newspaper, in acid-free archival storage boxes at the DUITS office.

Archival storage boxes in a closet, one of many.

2. Create an Online Archive

After scanning and researching, the images are uploaded to MeijiShowa. This online archive has a powerful search engine that allows you to search by keyword, theme, location, decade, time period, artist, publisher, or any combination of these.

You can search, for example, for images of prostitution in Tokyo during the Meiji Period or Japanese railways during the Showa Period. Within this search you can even select only photos, art & prints, or maps. Just click on a category on top.

Because you can drill down this deeply, you do not get endless pages of unrelated images—you just get what you ask for. Sometimes nothing.

The MeijiShowa archive is free to access. Usage of any of the images requires a fee. This helps to offset the costs a bit.

MeijiShowa online archive of vintage images of old Japan.

3. Share Research

On the Old Photos of Japan site, as well as in this newsletter, I share the results of my research. The aim is to give context to the images, and to document a culture that has mostly vanished since Japan started modernizing from the 1850s on.

Old Photos of Japan is also completely free to access.

Old Photos of Japan — front page.

Your Personal Museum

In other words, Old Photos of Japan is your personal museum for Japan’s visual heritage of daily life between the 1850s and 1960s. Acces it anytime and anywhere, totally free of charge.

However, it is not free for me to find, acquire, scan, restore, research, conserve and share these rare and irreplaceable images…

Over the past 17 years I have funded my activities with my work as a journalist and photographer. This limited how much time I could spend on the online museum. And if I spent more time, I had less money available…

This especially impacted the online archive. Some 60,000 images have not yet been edited, researched, captioned, keyworded, and uploaded to the archive. To make it a better educational tool, MeijiShowa also needs a drastic redesign.

Eventually, I aim to have over 100,000 vintage images of Japan on MeijiShowa. This would make it one of the world’s largest, if not the largest, specialized database of Japan’s visual heritage between the 1850s and 1960s.

The only way to accomplish this is to spend more money and time on MeijiShowa.

You Have Power

You can make a difference. If you can afford it, please support Old Photos of Japan so I can build the new archive and also have more time for research and writing. A monthly subscription is the most helpful, but one-time donations also help.

Your support is especially needed during the challenging period of building the new archive. This will take a few years. Once there are 100,000 images online, income from licensing and print sales will likely allow the project to mostly support itself. The goal is to create an open community project that can sustain itself.

I continue to self-fund. So Old Photos of Japan currently requires only a minimum of ¥250,000 a month (±USD 1,600 | EUR 1,500). Please help me reach that goal!

Now is a good time to donate. Because the yen is historically weak your dollar donation has far greater impact than usual.

The newsletter will remain free. But to make it easier to support Old Photos of Japan, I will start paid subscriptions on Substack soon. You can decide whether you want to donate directly on the site, or through the Substack subscription system.