Japanese Store, Honolulu

Japanese Store, Honolulu

Hawaii
19th Century
immigration
culture
Japanese

A photograph depicting a Japanese family in and around their store in Honolulu. The subjects are pictured in a mix of traditional and non-traditional clothing, and there is a sign in Japanese over the store. The image looks posed, as everyone is facing the camera, and it looks overexposed in places which may be due to camera technology of the time or the amount of light when the picture was being taken. This source is useful when thinking about immigration, in particular Asian and East-Asian immigration, which represented a significant proportion of the immigrants arriving in Hawaii during the nineteenth century. It is is also interesting to consider that the image was taken by a publishing company established in the late nineteenth century. Detroit Publishing Company became known for its photocrom postcards, particularly coloured ones. In this way, the photograph of the Japanese family is an outlier. However, it does tell us that the image may have been initially sold for profit, perhaps to demonstrate the immigrant cultures of Hawaii, or the kinds of businesses found there.

Detroit Publishing Co., publisher

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington

https://www.loc.gov/resource/det.4a20736/

1895-1910

Hannah Oliver

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington

N/A

Visual - photograph

19th century Hawai'i