Hyakunen Mae no Yokohama Kanagawa Ehagaki Fuukei (“Picture Postcards of Yokohama & Kanagawa 100 Years Ago”)

Publisher Yurindo celebrated its 90th anniversary in 1999 with a wonderful book containing 1,200 vintage postcards of landscape and street scenes of Yokohama and surrounding areas, mostly hand-colored.

Most of Japan’s early photographers lived and worked in Yokohama as this was, with Nagasaki, the city where photography first arrived.

As one of the few ports opened to foreign trade, which was additionally close to Tokyo, it attracted hordes of foreign tourists who bought countless hand-painted picture postcards.

As a result, probably more postcards were printed of Yokohama and surroundings than of any other area in Japan. It shows in this wonderful book, which contains an admirable number of hand-tinted images.

The famed Yokohama Archives of History compiled and edited the book. Many of the postcards were taken from the Archives’ own collection. Others were borrowed from institutions and private collectors.

Although all captions are in Japanese, most postcards have English place names printed on it.

The book is especially interesting to collectors because of its extended list of postcard publishers.

Unfortunately, the book has long been out of it print, but used copies still surface regularly.