Chudo-Ken. Views Within and Outside. Chewdoh-Ken (Tudor House).

1930. SHIMOMURA, Shotaro. Chudo-Ken. Views Within and Outside. Chewdoh-Ken (Tudor House). One leaf of text and 31 mounted gelatin silver prints, each with printed tissue guard. Oblong 4to, 218 x 278 mm., bound in contemporary decorative morocco by Matsuzaki & Co, preserved in a new tan half leather folding box. Kyoto: [ca. 1930]. Only edition of this eccentric Japanese book, published to showcase a Tudor-style mansion designed by William Merrell Vories for Shotaru Shimomura, the chairman of the Japanese department store chain Daimaru. The book is comprised of black and white tipped-in photographs of interior rooms, furniture, decorative elements, and exterior shots of this Western Tudor house built in Japan before the Second World War. Shimomura was also a keen photographer, and exhibited in the Ashiya photographic Salons of 1935, 1936, and 1937. Vories had gone to Japan as a missionary and started an architectural practice to help fund his missionary work. A precious, if somewhat exotic, object.