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In 1986 several photographs were discovered in Kiryu, Japan, by Eisuke Yamaga, the town historian, when he was asked by one of the old families in town to research and archive their rich photographic legacy. Among these photographs, there was a small picture in a round wooden frame. On the back of the frame was an inscription: "Spring of 1864. Portrait of Kakoku Shima. 36 years old. Photographer: Riu Shima." This is the earliest known photograph taken by a Japanese woman.
Just four years after the invention of the daguerreotype was announced in Paris in 1839, Dutch sailors brought it to Nagasaki, a port town located on a southwestern island 530 miles from Tokyo. For 250 years, it had been the only Japanese port open for trade with the outside world. The Dutch were the only Westerners permitted to enter Nagasaki, since they hadn't attempted to foist Christianity on the Japanese. It is recorded that the Japanese did not actually use a daguerreotype camera at that time, but instead, only made a drawing of the camera. In 1848 a daguerreotype was again brought to Japan by the Dutch. The oldest extant photograph in Japan was taken in 1857 by a group of scientists, and the first photo studio opened in 1862 in Nagasaki. Riu Shima's 1864 photograph was made only one year after Julia Margaret Cameron began taking pictures in England. Women photographers thus existed from the very beginning of the history of Japanese photography.
Riu was born in 1823 in Kiryu, a town 50 miles north of Tokyo, whose industrial mainstay was silk weaving. Whereas traditional Japanese women usually stayed at home, women in Kiryu were the backbone of the industry, since weaving was done with their own hands. There were two schools for women as early as 1829 in Kiryu, and Riu studied at one of them. At the age of 18, Riu went to Tokyo where she found work as a clerk (due to her advanced writing skill) for the Hitotsubashi family, one of the closest relatives of the Shogun family. It is said that she met her husband Kakoku Shima at the Hitotsubashi house, as he sometimes visited there as an English translator. Kakoku, who was already a well-known painter, was...