Esaki Reiji

Who They Were

Esaki Reiji (江崎礼二, えざき れいじ) was a Japanese photographer and politician who lived from 1845 to 1910. He was born in Esaki, a place in Gifu Prefecture whose name he carried as his family name, and he died in Tokyo on 28 January 1910. Over a career that began in the early years of the Meiji era, he became one of the most commercially successful portrait photographers in Tokyo and one of the first Japanese to master the new photographic technologies arriving from Europe and the United States.

His working life straddled two worlds. He trained as a photographer under Shimooka Renjō, opened his own studio, and built a business that served thousands of ordinary families. At the same time he served in local government, sitting on the Asakusa Ward Council and the Tokyo City Council. He was also a member of the Japan Photographic Society.

His son, Iwakichi Esaki, is recorded as his child. The family name is sometimes rendered Ezaki in romanisation, reflecting the same characters read slightly differently.

Life and Career

Esaki Reiji was born in 1845, in the first year of the Kōka era (弘化, こうか), during the Edo period. That era ran from 1603 to 1868, a span of more than two and a half centuries during which Japan was governed by the Tokugawa shogunate and largely closed to outside contact. Photography reached Japan only in the final decades of that period, carried by Dutch and other foreign traders through Nagasaki, and it remained a rare and technical curiosity.

In 1871 Esaki became a student of Shimooka Renjō, one of the founding figures of Japanese photography. His training was short. Within the same year he opened his own photographic studio in Tokyo, and the following year he moved the business to Asakusa, a district in the north-east of the city. There he built one of Tokyo's leading portrait studios, and through the last decades of the nineteenth century his shop was among the best known in the capital.

The decisive technical step came in 1883, when he imported dry plate negatives — glass plates pre-coated with a light-sensitive emulsion that could be stored and used later, unlike the wet collodion process that required a photographer to coat and expose a plate while it was still damp. Esaki was the first Japanese photographer to use them. The new plates freed him from the portable darkroom and the rush of wet-plate work, and he became known as a "quick photographer", a specialist in family portraits. In 1883 he also made a photograph of a torpedo explosion in the Sumida River, an image that became very famous.

In 1889 he succeeded in photographing fireworks. Around 1893 he produced one of his best-known works, a collage of babies titled "Collage of Babies: One Thousand and Seven Hundred Children That in Three Years Came to My Shop". A copy of that work is held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Alongside his studio work, Esaki held public office as a member of the Asakusa Ward Council and the Tokyo City Council.

Why They Matter

Esaki Reiji sits at the point where Japanese photography stopped being a foreign technique demonstrated by a handful of pioneers and became an ordinary commercial service used by ordinary households. Shimooka Renjō and his contemporaries proved that the medium could be practised in Japan; Esaki turned it into a business that families walked into, sat for, and paid for.

The dry plate was the instrument of that change. By importing dry plates in 1883 and adopting them before any other Japanese photographer, Esaki removed the most cumbersome constraint on portrait work. Sitters no longer had to hold still through a slow, improvised chemical process, and the photographer no longer had to prepare his materials on the spot. Portraits became faster, more reliable, and cheaper to produce — the conditions under which a mass portrait trade could exist at all.

His subjects were not only people. The torpedo explosion in the Sumida River in 1883 and the fireworks of 1889 show a photographer willing to point a camera at events that were difficult to capture, and the collage of some one thousand seven hundred babies photographed over three years is an early example of photography used to assemble a cumulative record rather than a single image. That collage now belongs to the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which places a Meiji-era Tokyo studio practice inside a major international museum.

His political service in the Asakusa Ward Council and the Tokyo City Council reflects the standing a successful studio owner could hold in his district. Esaki was a local notable as well as a tradesman, and the two roles reinforced each other in the Tokyo of the 1880s and 1890s.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 江崎礼二. It is read えざき れいじ in kana, and romanised as Esaki Reiji. The family name is sometimes romanised Ezaki, because the same characters can be read either way.

江 — read e here. The character means "inlet", "bay", or "creek", and it appears in the names of many places near water. It is the first element of the surname.

崎 — read saki here. It means "cape", "promontory", or "small peninsula" — a piece of land jutting out. Together, 江崎 describes a landscape of inlets and headlands, and it is also the name of the place in Gifu Prefecture where Esaki Reiji was born.

礼 — read rei here. It means "courtesy", "manners", "propriety", or "ritual". It is a common element in given names and carries a sense of correct and respectful conduct.

二 — read ji here. It means "two", and in a personal name it normally marks a second son. Note that this character is not read ni, its usual reading for the number two, but ji, a change that occurs in names.

The given name 礼二 is therefore a two-character name meaning something like "courteous second son". The alternative written form 禮二 uses the older, pre-simplification form of 礼, which is why the name appears in some sources with that character. The reading is unchanged.

Legacy

Esaki Reiji died in Tokyo on 28 January 1910. His studio practice, built in Asakusa from 1872 and equipped with imported dry plates from 1883, belongs to the first generation of Japanese commercial photography. The images that carry his name forward are the Sumida River torpedo explosion of 1883, the fireworks of 1889, and the collage of one thousand seven hundred babies made around 1893, a copy of which is held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His membership in the Japan Photographic Society and his service on the Asakusa Ward Council and the Tokyo City Council record a career that combined the studio, the professional association, and the institutions of the city he worked in.