Photo album

The authorship and dating of the inscriptions on the leporello remain a puzzle. The German writing appears in two script types: Latin and Sütterlin, while the Japanese writing has been done in an unsure and clumsy script, seemingly written by an unlettered Japanese person. The information is sometimes wrong, locations are misidentified and – in the case of the Japanese captions – includes the use of incorrect characters. With regard to dating, although most of the photographs seem to be from the 1880s, the Japanese inscription on the image of the empress describes the sitter with an appellation (“Empress Dowager“) that was used from 1912 onward. It is quite possible that the production of the album, the purchase of the album and the writing of captions were all done at different dates.