YAMAZAKI Kane’ichirō 山崎 鋆一郎.
满洲の展望 [Manshū no tenbō, i.e. Views of Manchuria].
Dalian, Kane’ichirō Yamazaki for Kinjirō Hamai, 10 May Shōwa 7 [1932].
4to, ff. [5 (title, watercolour reproduction on textured paper with tissue guard, preface, contents, chromolithograph with tissue guard)], 58 (each with a facing collotype or gravure plate, up to 7 images per plate, each print captioned below), [1]; some light browning to leaves; else a good copy in original green velvet-covered boards with yapp edges, title and decorative design in gilt to front board and spine, decorative orange-bronze endpapers; velvet faded to beige in places, extremities a little worn.
A highly illustrated photobook on Manchuria published soon after the Japanese invasion.
The work extensively lists and illustrates the tourist, commercial, and industrial advantages of the region. The précis of towns and landmarks accompanying the images details a host of local facts. A few paragraphs also include a succinct political comment either regarding the Chinese system, or the future of the Japanese one. The White Tower in Liaoyang is noted as being ‘left along to decay without repair’ while observations in Mukden ‘tell us that [sic] how grand and disorderly the city is as an old town of China’. Meanwhile, ‘Changchun … is the suitable intimate city for Japanese’. The city was later renamed Hsinking by the Japanese and became the capital of Manchukuo.
There are a number of typographic and syntactic errors in the English translation as well as certain eccentricities of style, e.g. ‘Kharbin! Kharbin station! Oh! Great Ito. To recall the unfortunate affair in the sorrowful history, … Prince Ito was [sic] shot himself to death at the third column to the left on the platform of the station on October 29th, 1909’.
OCLC finds three copies in North America (Bishop Museum, Harvard, Wolfsonian-FIU), two in the UK (BL, Tate), and one at CUHK.
