Photographs of 19th Century Japan

Quite a few of those still exist!

* Wysteria Vine. It is not written, but I am pretty sure it's Kameido Shrine. You need to come at the right time to see flowers like that though.

* Nikko All pictures that show shrine and pagoda

* Osaka Castle

* Daibutsu, at Kamakura

* Jinrikishia Now it's for tourists, but you can ride in Asakusa.

* View Ojigoku on Great Boiling Springs, Hakone.

* Wrestlers. Sumo still exists and looks like that.

* Gion Machi Street, at Kyoto. Looks a bit different, but there are still many old houses like this.

* View of Nara.

* Tennojo Buddhist Temple

* Hakone Lake of Fujiyama

What does not exist anymore is any picture showing a town or village. I feel sad about this. There are a very few places that kept this (E.g. Shirakawago). Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.

Yeah, Nikko still looks pretty much the same, just with a lot more people.

Osaka Castle is a reconstruction. It's an empty shell, almost like a movie decor at this stage. If you want to see a real castle, there's the Himeji castle not too far from there.

You are absolutely right. The inside of Osaka castle is now concrete or something. But the outside and castle grounds still look like the article picture. Himeji castle is a great recommendation.

Unfortunately those pretty houses come at a cost. Traditional materials and techniques usually come at a price. Lots of wood and joinery work needs to be done, much of it by hand. They are also not well insulated so hard to keep warm in winter. They're so pretty though!.

You can still see a few of these houses and their traditional gardens in some of the wealthy, old-money smelling parts of Kyoto.

My next door neighbour lives in one of those thatched roof houses. I once visited in mid May, it was sweltering hot outside so I was in Tshirts and shorts. Inside, it was freezing! They had the kotatsu and a kerosene stove on.

You can certainly combine modern construction techniques with traditional looks. Don't expect 1:1 looks but you can make them less boring.

> Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.

When I visited Japan last year most of my pictures were of old "crummy" looking buildings and older homes. They had character vs the modern flat buildings popping up all over. I even snapped pictures of the overhead wiring, utility poles and building connections. I now understand the prevalence of overhead wires and utility poles in manga/anime. I even read a white paper on Tepco's commitment to move as much of these old overhead wires underground.

Speaking of "crummy," R. Crumb talked about an afternoon he spent driving around the suburbs in the 1980s taking pictures of houses, streets, and strip malls so he could draw realistic backgrounds for his comics.

> “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing,” he says, “The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”

https://time.com/3802766/r-crumbs-snapshots-source-material-...

I don't have a reference for it (it might be from the film "Crumb") but I remember him saying that people would rave about how he artistically exaggerated the proliferation of poles, signage, and overhead lines to create over-the-top dystopian images, when he was just copying backgrounds from photographs of suburban California.

That's a feature these days!