Ogawa Kazumasa was a pivotal figure in early Japanese photography. He adapted cutting-edge Western technology in photo-printing processes to produce numerous half-tone and collotype publications which transformed the market. Ogawa was the great master of collotype in Japan and produced many beautiful books of views, both in tinted color and in monotone. His work tends to be found mostly in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century and the first two decades of the Twentieth.

The interesting and delicate scenes in this album include a number showing Japanese people at leisure, in a street scene, a crowd at a sumo match, people involved in their daily occupations and a number of temples, gardens and other places of interest to the early 20th century visitor to Japan.
This album proved very popular and was reprinted a number of times, in some editions all of the plates are in color, as is the case with this copy, and at other times the edition only shows some plates in color and while the others are in black and white.