Photographs of 19th Century Japan

Osaka Castle is a reconstruction. It's an empty shell, almost like a movie decor at this stage. If you want to see a real castle, there's the Himeji castle not too far from there.

> Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.

When I visited Japan last year most of my pictures were of old "crummy" looking buildings and older homes. They had character vs the modern flat buildings popping up all over. I even snapped pictures of the overhead wiring, utility poles and building connections. I now understand the prevalence of overhead wires and utility poles in manga/anime. I even read a white paper on Tepco's commitment to move as much of these old overhead wires underground.

Unfortunately those pretty houses come at a cost. Traditional materials and techniques usually come at a price. Lots of wood and joinery work needs to be done, much of it by hand. They are also not well insulated so hard to keep warm in winter. They're so pretty though!.

You can still see a few of these houses and their traditional gardens in some of the wealthy, old-money smelling parts of Kyoto.

Yeah, Nikko still looks pretty much the same, just with a lot more people.

It doesn't work. The photos don't load.

Can you share the name & author of the book?

I'll plug Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands as an extraordinary deep dive into a world that's entirely disappeared in our lifetimes:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/825419.Arabian_Sands

Some video games try and do the former; I play too much FFXIV and a recurring theme there is that you go to a new area and you get the tourist's experience, tour the area, view the sights, meet the locals, figure out the local history and culture, etc.

Sure, it's kind of superficial, usually based on human civilizations / design trends / etc; that is:

* Heavensward: Europe / traditional knights and castles and church stuffs

* Stormblood: East-Asia / Japan, clearly a favorite thing to work on from the developers

* Shadowbringers: is actually pretty independent

* Endwalker: Rome / Greece on the one side, India on the other, philosophical existential crises in the late game (that part is actually really good, they invented multiple (7-8 or so?) different civilizations who all achieved some kind of immortality and pursued the meaning of life, ending up disillusioned)

* Dawntrail (latest): south & mesoamerica on the one side, cyberpunk sci-fi on the other

Is it "Around the world on a bicycle"? I, too, would like to know the name of this book. Sounds interesting!

> this book of a guy who cycled across Central Asia and in Japan

Go on, give us a clue. Title, author, even language...?

Nikko really does feel like stepping back in time if you catch it early enough

> The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.

getting utterly destroyed by fire bombing (or atomic bombs in the case of Nagasaki) does that to cities.

A friend of mine also recently redid a machiya in Kyoto. It even had the godness mask near the ceiling, amazing.

Side note: I quickly checked the dedede project and I'm so enthralled with it! I will use it to improve my Japanese, thank you!

Keiko Fukuda, a judo trainer (10th degree black belt) in SF who died in 2013 aged 99 (she taught in her dojo in Noe Valley even into the last year of her life) was the student of the judo founder Kano Jigoro who opened his first judo school in 1882.

That’s how I feel about present day humanity with regards to computer tech. I was born around the time of the 8086; my parents never really became fluent with computers. I was a nerd and got into computers as a teen, soon enough I had internet and then WiFi and now frickin smartphones hooked into LLMs. We’re the Information Age equivalent of those folks who spanned all the from the feudal era to riding Honda motorbikes.

They were dyed, rather than painted. The details come from the photograph.

There was nothing to do back then. And if there was, it was crazy and/or reserved for the feudal lords. The primary income of the state was through alcohol taxes. Countries thought it was okay to invade other countries just to make themselves bigger/stronger countries. Nationalism, racism, sexism were the norm. Most people can't read/write. Information is scant and passed on by word of mouth.

In some ways we made it better and in some ways we made it worse.

In ~150 years someone will pick some photos taken today and post them and someone will probably wonder the same thing. Go out and do some sightseeing - a lot of the sights in these photos still exist, but also, you look at these photos with different eyes than the people that grew up there do; changing how you look at your own environment or places of interest will probably also help.

These photos are, ah, not representative (most historical artefacts of this type aren’t; part of why people tend to have an impression of Victorian London as basically hell on earth is that, unusually, photos _were_ taken of the nasty bits, but really it was no worse than anywhere else at the time).

You’d certainly prefer to live in Japan in 2025 than in 1860.

Interesting, my reaction to these photos was "no thank you". It's fun to have a glimpse at the past, but I have no desire to live back then.

In particular I'm happy to live in a modern, well-insulated home with climate control. Transportation is also a lot more convenient with cars, trains, and airplanes. And clothing and fashion of the day also looks very uncomfortable to me.

Some of the nature scenes look lovely. But there are still plenty of places in Japan where you can experience the same sense of natural beauty and solitude.

[dead]

Thief with a katana...