Materials Related to Yokoyama Matsusaburo (held by the

The Yokoyama Matsusaburō Materials: A Pioneer Photographer's Working Archive

Yokoyama Matsusaburō taught himself photography for a personal reason. He wanted to keep his mother's likeness before she was gone, and one object in this collection is the result: a small glass portrait of a woman named Miya, set into an ornate copper frame. From that private beginning grew the career of one of the first Japanese to make a living behind a camera.

The collection brings together 83 items that passed down through the Takada family of Hakodate, and in June 2023 Japan listed them as an Important Cultural Property in the category of historical materials. Most date from the 1860s and 1870s, when photography was still a foreign novelty in the country. They include glass negatives, paper prints, hand-colored "photo oil paintings," a lithograph, an oil painting, and two written records. As a group, they show both what Yokoyama photographed and how he worked.

Yokoyama (1838–1884) was born on Etorofu, the largest of the Kuril Islands, and grew up in the port of Hakodate in southern Hokkaidō. He saw a camera for the first time around 1854, when Commodore Perry's American squadron called at the port, and spent years working out the chemistry on his own. By the early Meiji period he had opened a studio called Tsūtenrō at Ikenohata in Ueno, Tokyo.

Why the Collection Matters

Very little survives from the first generation of Japanese commercial photographers. Wet-plate glass is fragile, studios closed, and family papers were scattered. A coherent body of working material from a single early photographer is rare, and that scarcity is the main reason the national government singled this one out.

Yokoyama's name is tied to several landmark assignments. In 1871 the official Ninagawa Noritane asked him to record the old Edo Castle, by then emptied of the shogun and falling into disrepair. Working alongside the photographer Uchida Kuichi, he produced images that the Western-style painter Takahashi Yuichi later colored; they were bound into an album of 64 views. The following year he joined the Jinshin Survey, a government expedition that catalogued old temples, shrines, aristocratic holdings, and the imperial Shōsōin treasures across Ise, Nagoya, Nara, and Kyoto. He later taught photography and lithography at the Army Officer School and kept experimenting with new printing methods.

The Takada materials sit beside those public achievements as the private record. They came down through the household his younger brother Matsuzō served and later lived in, and into which the brothers' elder sister had married. Because they stayed in one family rather than entering the art market, they kept their context: who was photographed, in what order techniques were learned, and what an unfinished picture looked like before it was finished.

What to Look For

Seventy-two of the 83 items are glass plates, all made by the collodion wet-plate process. Sixty-eight are negatives meant for paper printing; four are ambrotypes, in which a thin negative is backed with black so that it reads as a positive. Many of the sitters belong to the Yokoyama and Takada families, a reminder that early studios often practiced first on the people closest to them.

One negative sets itself apart. It shows Shimizudani Kinnaru, the nobleman the new Meiji government sent north in 1868 to head its court at Hakodate during the Boshin War. The glass is noticeably thicker than the plates Yokoyama used in Tokyo, and its cut edges are uneven. Those physical clues point to a plate made in Hakodate during the short window when Shimizudani was stationed there, and they help fix a moment in Yokoyama's own movements.

The ambrotype of his mother Miya is the heart of the group. Judging from the carpet and other studio details, it was probably taken in Hakodate around the end of the Edo period. The copper frame around it was made with real care, which fits the family account that her portrait was the reason he learned the craft at all.

Five objects are photo oil paintings, a hybrid form Yokoyama is credited with developing in Japan after seeing examples that the photographer Suzuki Shin'ichi the Second had brought back from the United States. The method is ingenious: an albumen print is glued face-down onto glass, the paper backing is scraped away until the image shows through, and the picture is then painted from behind in oils. Because the collection holds both a finished work, "Mother and Child," and an unfinished male portrait, it lets you watch the technique mid-process, something a single polished example never could.

Two written items round out the group. One is a handwritten manual on carbon printing, set down around 1877–1878 from methods Yokoyama had learned at the Army Officer School, evidence that he was studying that process unusually early for a Japanese photographer. The other is a letter from 1884, written just after his death, in which his pupils describe compiling an account of his life.

Seeing Yokoyama's Work Today

The Takada collection itself is not on permanent public display, and the national database records no current owner or holding institution, so a casual visitor cannot expect to see these particular objects. Related works by Yokoyama, however, are held by major Tokyo museums and do appear in exhibitions.

The Tokyo National Museum in Ueno holds the album of 64 old Edo Castle photographs. The Tokyo Metropolitan Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryōgoku holds 29 of his original Edo Castle glass plates and 257 stereo glass plates from the Jinshin Survey; that museum reopened on 31 March 2026 after a four-year renovation, so its galleries are accessible again. In Hakodate, where he grew up, his grave stands at the temple Kōryū-ji, and his pupils placed a memorial stone for him at Sengaku-ji in the Takanawa district of Tokyo. Photographic material is light-sensitive and shown only in rotation, so checking each museum's current schedule before a visit is wise.