Yokohama in Bloom: Hand-Tinted Japanese Collotype Postcards
Hand-tinted Japanese collotype postcards are photomechanical prints colored one card at a time by hand. The set kept in this family archive, a run of Yokohama street views printed in soft sepia and inscribed in English between 1917 and 1918, shows what the medium was able to hold: not the journey, but the way the journey was seen. Each card also carries a second record on its back, penciled in English by the great-grandfather who brought them home from Japan, and the two do not always agree.
What are hand-tinted Japanese collotype postcards?
The name records how the cards were made, in two stages. First the photograph was printed by collotype, a photomechanical process that reproduces continuous tone from a light-sensitive gelatin plate, without the dot screen of a halftone. Then the color was added by hand, brushed on in thin, translucent color, tint by tint: rose into a blossom, blue into a strip of sky, a wash of ground into a street. Each card is therefore both a press-printed photograph and a hand-colored object, and the application of color could vary from one impression to another.
These were made for the souvenir and postal trade in the years around the First World War. The backs are the multilingual divided back of the international post, the message and address sharing one side beneath the printed Carte Postale heading; the fronts carry small bilingual captions in English and Japanese. That is the whole definition: a collotype photograph of a place, colored by hand for sale, mailed or kept as a record of having been there.
Along the Streets of Yokohama
The views move through the city at eye level. One card sets you on Theater Street in Isezakicho, where festival banners and hanging signboards crowd the promenade and Western-style buildings with domed towers rise over the Japanese shopfronts. Telegraph poles run the length of the street; beneath them people move in kimono, a parasol here, a bicycle there. “Lots of Japanese theaters,” he wrote on the back, calling it “the Broadway of Yokohama” and “its gayest street.” What the card records is not spectacle but coexistence, a street keeping its own rhythm while taking on another.
From there the set climbs to Jizozaka, a narrow hillside street of wooden shopfronts. “A characteristic street,” he noted, “except that most of the streets are just half as wide,” and a penciled arrow on the back points to a passing rickshaw, named in the language of the period. The observation is plain: not hierarchy but the human scale of daily movement, the choreography of labor before motor traffic reshaped the street.
At Momijizaka the season arrives. Cherry branches arch the length of a hillside lane, tinted in rose and ash, and beneath them women ride in rickshaws and walk in layered kimono, several under parasols. “Very well dressed, high-class,” he wrote of the women in one blossom-season view, adding, “That is the way the women dress.” In early twentieth-century Japan dress carried meaning the way architecture did: sleeve length signaled age and marital status, the fold of an obi spoke of season and formality. In the tinted image, cloth and bearing read as clearly as the lane behind them.
The gentlest card opens onto Yokohama Park, where children move among the visitors under flowering trees and petals drift across the paths and the patterned kimono. Its printed caption reads only “The Yokohama Park.” There is no argument in it and no claim, only a recorded afternoon.
What the Front Shows, and the Back Corrects
Turn the cards over and a second voice appears, and it is not always flattered by the color. Beside a tinted view of the Asamayama and Mayeta bridge, he wrote that the scene was “not as pretty as the picture would make out,” that “the coloring makes it prettier than it really is,” and that in reality “the town is a dirty, drab colored affair.” The front idealizes; the back corrects. The card keeps both, and neither cancels the other. That is the honest thing about these objects: the hand that added the rose to the blossom and the hand that noted the dirt in the street are recorded on the same piece of paper.
This is close to the reading we give a chair's finish. A tinted card and a cleaned oak surface each retain traces of what met them: light and season in one, the returning hand in the other. When we read the wear and patina of furniture, we ask of its surface what these cards ask of pigment and pencil: that it disclose where it has been touched, altered, and carried through time. The penciled correction on the back is the card's own condition note, the great-grandfather telling the truth about a place he had just made prettier.
Read together, the cards are less tourism than a quiet kind of fieldwork, an anthropology of attention. That is why they sit in the archive Acanthus keeps rather than in the collection it sells. Their value here is not decorative, but documentary. They show how an ordinary object can hold two truths at once, the presented surface and the plain note beneath it, and keep both legible for a hundred years. What lasts is not color alone, but the attention recorded in pigment and pencil. That endurance, rather than rarity, is what gives the cards their worth.
Object in This Journal
Hand-tinted collotype postcards of Yokohama, inscribed 1917–1918.
Collotype photographs colored by hand, printed for the souvenir trade and kept, with the great-grandfather's English notes, in the family archive. This object remains in the Acanthus archive.
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