This rare photo from 1871 shows Tokyo’s Nihonbashi Bridge made famous in countless woodblock prints. A year after Austrian photographer Michael Moser shot this scene, the bridge was torn down and rebuilt.
In July 1871 a strong typhoon devastated western Japan. It was one of the first strong typhoons that foreigners in the newly opened foreign settlements experienced and it shocked them tremendously.
A traveller observes the Kisogawa River near Agematsu Juku, the thirty-eighth of the sixty-nine stations of the Nakasendō, now located in Kiso, Nagano Prefecture.
A bridge on the Tōkaidō with Mount Fuji in the back. Bridges on the Tōkaidō were far more common than is generally thought.
Japanese porters carrying travelers across a wide river. For centuries this was the only way to cross several rivers on the storied Tōkaidō highway.
Three boatmen transport passengers and a rickshaw on the famed ferry at Kawasaki, the second station on the Tōkaidō. Although this scene is peaceful, river crossings rightfully terrified travelers in old Japan.