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Current Project Areas
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Outsiders In Japan
Wedding group, c. 1946--Kyoto, Japan
© Lost Light Preservation Project, 2005. All Rights Reserved.
With the opening of Japan to the outside world in the 19th century, the port city of Kobe became the most important locus of foreign settlement in the Kansai region. After the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 caused outsiders to abandon Yokohama, Kobe assumed a pre-eminent position as the heart of foreign settlement in Japan as a whole. The city was home to a diverse group of foreign residents–Americans, Russians, Irish, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, Chinese, Indians and others. Each foreign community coalesced into their own neighborhoods, printed newspapers in their own languages, created their own social clubs and religious institutions and buried their dead in their own cemeteries. This Lost Light project is gathering visual evidence about these communities as they pursued commercial ambition and cultural stability against a backdrop of danger, uncertainty and social turmoil: the expansion of Japanese military ambition in Asia, the advent of World War II and the devastating American fire-bombing of Kobe, the unconditional surrender by the Emperor, and the subsequent Allied occupation of the country.
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