Japanese Photo Album

[Sourn Rose]

Createyour own personalised photo book / photo album. All Kitaken photo albums are handmade and can be used as a classic photo album, scrapbook or guestbook. The larger album formats are ideal for weddings, birthdays and similar festive occasions. Since each album is made to order as a unique product, there are numerous possibilities to personalise a dream album according to your own taste. Kitaken albums are perfect as a unique wedding gift with an extremely personal touch.

As an intern at Densho, I have been working to digitize two photograph albums from the Kurasuke Ikeda family, based in Seattle. These albums detail the history of the Ikeda family from approximately 1910 through the 1950s, and show not only images of life in the United States, but also images of family life in Japan. This is their story: Kurasuke Ikeda and Kome Sakamoto were married in the early 1920s before their immigration from Nagano prefecture, Japan, to the United States. The albums include images of both the families, along with extended relatives and close friends in Japan.

Photographs and captions in the albums convey that following their immigration, the Ikedas settled in or near Seattle and had three boys: Minoru, Khori and Kay. During WWII, at least two of the boys served in the US army, and the youngest, Kay, spent a period of time with his parents incarcerated in the Minidoka concentration camp in Hunt Idaho. Despite incarceration, both Kurasuke and Kome Ikeda sought and were granted citizenship in 1942; the album includes their social security cards and Certificates of Identification. Following WWII, we know two of the Ikeda boys married and had children of their own.

If your family or community organization has documents related to the Japanese American experience before, during, and after World War II, please consider loaning them to Densho for digital preservation. We seek materials including artwork, scrapbooks, letters, diaries, government documents, audio/visual recordings, newspapers, and magazines. Each item will be scanned and made available online through our Digital Repository. This grants access to students, teachers, researchers, scholars, professionals, and the general public. After creating high quality digital copies for preservation purposes and for web/online access, we return the materials to individuals, families, or organizations. We also provide them with a complete set of digital files for their own use. To find out more about loaning materials, please contact Caitlin Oiye, Photo and Document Collections Manager at colle...@densho.org.

Odette Allen is a recent graduate of Western Washington University where she completed a degree in archival management. In addition to working with Densho she is the archivist at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Connor and editor of the Sound Archivist newsletter.

To decorate my album, I decided to use a white silk ribbon and create a tag with heart shaped die cuts and vellum. I completed this soft, romantic photo album with a piece of taupe twine to bring the natural elements forward. What do you think?

These beautiful artisan photo albums are brought to you by Hubert Bookbindery. Every photo album is made by hand in their workshop in the heart of Cork City, on the island of Ireland and is perfect for keeping your photographs and memories. Each Album is bound using Chiyogami Japanese paper and high quality book cloth. Available in a wide range of papers and sizes with a choice of 30 or 50 sheets of acid free cream card & tissue inter leaf. Optional personalised title page insert also available with gold or silver text.

These beautiful artisan chiyogami photo albums are brought to you by Hubert Bookbindery. Every photo album is made by hand in their workshop in the heart of Cork City, on the island of Ireland and is perfect for keeping your photographs and memories. Each Album is bound using Chiyogami Japanese paper and high quality book cloth. Available in a wide range of papers and sizes with a choice of 30 or 50 sheets of acid free cream or black card & tissue inter leaf. Optional personalised title page insert also available with gold or silver text.

Sitting down with a cup of peppermint tea and opening up an album full of memories, what a way to spend an evening. Whether you are introducing someone new to your past self or reminiscing about old times with a friend, nothing beats pulling forward those stories from the back of your mind (not even scrolling on a top of the range phone)

Papers Available: Blue Petals Ducks in Fight White Dragon Flower Blossom Vine Blue Lace Botanic Garden Cranes in Flight Gold Fan Gilded Leaf Meadow Sunset Silhouettes Spring Flowers Storks in Flight Oriental Night Dreamcatcher

Blue Petals, Red Dragon Flower, White Dragon Flower, Botanic Garden, Gold Fan, Meadow, Sunset Silhouettes, Spring Flowers, Poppies, Blue Lotus, Gilded Leaf, Daisy Garden, Dreamcatcher, Oriental Nights, Radiant Leaf, Storks in Flight

We don't see much on the forum of the US Army's 15th Infantry China service which ran for 26 years, ending in 1938. Today I had a chance to evaluate a photo album from a soldier who served with the 15th in Tientsin from 1930-38.

Besides the very thick photo album, there are also three Chinese-published magazine-style pictorials on the Chinese-Japanese war of that period. Two of the pictorials are called "SHANGHAI WAR PICTORIALS." One still has its front cover and is No. 3. I can't find any dates on them but one has a memorial tribute to Robert Short, the first American pilot killed in aerial combat with the Japanese. That was in 1932 and you can read about it at

The books and the photo album all have many graphic images of those atrocities - a few of the less graphic images are shown below. Some of the images are huge, and hand-tinted. The photo album, with its carved covers, is quite large, perhaps 14-18 inches wide and some of the images are the same size as the album.

I did not count the photos in the album but there certainly are hundreds of them. It begins with images from Hawaii and the Philippines, including thre bare-breasted island girls common in GI photo albums of that era. There are Chinese village shots, members of the 15th at the Great Wall, Chinese and Japanese troops, what appears to be a parade of the international forces that occupied small parts of Tientsin at the time and some nice shots of this soldier's unit.

"The first American aviator to die in combat against the Japanese, Robert Short, was killed Feb. 22, 1932. Short, a native of Tacoma, Wash., had been hired by the L.E. Gale Co. to fly and sell Boeing fighters in China. Relatively little is known about Short beyond the fact that he was an ex-Air Corps pilot seeking work. Described variously as a stunt and endurance pilot and as a soldier of fortune, he once said in a newspaper interview that he would be happy to die in his fighter.

Bob the majority of the photos shown are indeed stock...but you have some great images in that album....the Map is collectible in its own right....the ladder scaling was a common "allied" exercise in China..,,bug I have not seen that particular image which is rather nice

I am amazed at the large amount of atrocity photos in this album. Many are quite gruesome, and made even more so by being printed very large and then hand-tinted. They are all prints from negatives, not half-tones run off on a printing press. It raises the question of who was taking and distributing these photos? Apparently the Japanese killers did not mind having their photos taken during the act and that made me wonder if Japanese troops took and distributed them? I could understand how distributing such photos could be an act of terrorism that would make the Chinese think twice about resisting when the Japanese came to their neighborhoods.

Above, I showed a few paragraphs of text of what seems to be a message to the world about what was happening in China, a message the world certainly didn't answer, even though they had diplomats and troops in the midst of the atrocities. Certainly the ability to conduct such an unfettered brutal campaign in front of Western governments must have emboldened the Japanese for expansion of their offense throughout the Pacific.

3a8082e126