[Annotated Vernacular Photograph Album of a Japanese Tourist Traveling Across the United States Just After World War I]

[Various locations in the United States], 1919. Very good.. [50] leaves, illustrated with 198 tipped-in sepia-toned photographs, almost all around 5 x 3 inches (a handful somewhat smaller), all with white ink manuscript captions in English. Oblong quarto. Contemporary black cloth photograph album with "Places and Faces" in gilt on front cover, string tied. Moderate wear, soiling, and minor scuffing to boards. Occasional creasing and minor wear to images. A unique and informative photographic record of an extensive cross-country journey by a young Japanese man from San Francisco to New York in 1918 and 1919. The trip took place between December 1918 and September 1919, beginning in Yokohama. Though the traveler is unnamed, he was most likely Fujisawa Tomonosuke, the son of the founder of Fujisawa Yakuhin, once one of the major pharmaceutical companies in Japan. The company is now called Astellas Pharma, Inc. According to a company history, Fujisawa Tomonosuke travelled to the United States in 1919 as the company opened a branch in New York. The last page of the present album shows a Buddhist-style memorial with an explanatory caption on the verso, which states that Fujisawa Tomokichi (Tomonosuke's father) built it in 1918 to console thousands of deaths during World War I. The monument still sits in Domyoji Temple near Osaka. Another clue that the album was compiled by Tomonosuke is the practice by the compiler to identify all the subjects in the album by a prefix and their last name except for one, who is constantly referred to as "Tom."

Tomonosuke's journey begins in Yokohama, where he boarded the Tenyo Maru, which delivered him via Honolulu to San Francisco on December 26, 1918. He stayed in San Francisco for about six months and visited numerous locations around the Bay Area, including Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Ocean Beach, Seal Rock, Golden Gate Park, Oakland, Lincoln Park, and more. In late-May, he makes his way to Los Angeles and Pasadena, where he visits vast oil fields (where one image is captioned "Hundreds of oil wells in Los Angeles"), a Southern Pacific Railroad station, the zoo, Bush Garden, and other sites.

After a few days in southern California, Tom sets off across the continent to his presumed ultimate destination of New York, briefly visiting Salt Lake City, Denver, and Chicago before arriving at Niagara Falls by June 3. He includes numerous shots of the falls before arriving in New York City. His stay in New York was extensive, and included many sightseeing tours to locations in New York, but also New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He includes shots of Bronx Park, the Poughkeepsie Bridge, the Victory Arch, the Statue of Liberty, and other sights around Manhattan, along withe scenes in Montclair, Atlantic Highland, and Culver's Lake, New Jersey and a few locations in Pennsylvania, such as Sawkill Falls on the Delaware River. He also witnessed the commemoration parades for both the American Army's 2nd Division and General Pershing's "Grand Parade Day" in New York City, each of which he preserved in a handful of photographs.

In addition to the variety of the settings, the photographs reveal real skill and technique by the photographer. The images are mostly well composed and informative in nature. Despite the fact that the compiler was Japanese, all of the captions are written in confident English, lending further credence to the notion that the compiler was highly educated and confident, as would be the son of the founder of one of Japan's most successful companies. An exceptional annotated vernacular photograph album preserving the adventures of a precocious Japanese business traveller in the United States just after the First World War.