‘Savages Who Can Sing The Japanese National Anthem’
Our photographic journey today started with a silly link* to The Secret Museum of Mankind, a 1935 mystery book without any author, credits, copyright, page numbers, or index…Just photos and demented captions that targeted titillating teenage boys of the 1930s who normally willywanked to the National Geographic.
Natives of the little village of Kampanzan, in northern Formosa. Their tribe, which belongs to the Atayal group, is considered one of the least civilized on the island; but Japanese influence is slowly penetrating into the mountain recesses, and Kampanzan now boasts of a village school where small savages may receive elementary instruction under Japanese supervision.
The
Secret Album of Asia
As fun as the The Secret Museum of Mankind is, it doesn’t cover Japan well. Check out The Ama: Girl Shellfish Divers 
via the Ohio State University collection.
Even odder are these smiling teen courtesans locked behind wooden bars in Yoshiwara pleasure quarters of turn-of-the-century Tokyo shown below.
These photos of low-teen happy hookers come from the large Geddes Collection of old Japan.
My buddy Mulboyne offers many other links to old Japanese photographs such as IZA, one of the Sankei media group websites, who put up a series of photographs of the Showa era’s modernization(1926–1989) in Japan.
IZA photosite
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