Ninagawa Noritane

Ninagawa Noritane, photographed on 15 July 1879. He was notably reluctant. As his American friend Edward Morse recalled: ‘I actually abducted him… to the photographer’. In the 1930s, an admirer remembered Japanese antiquarian Ninagawa Noritane fondly as ‘simple-hearted and unpretentious. He was frugal and sometimes walked around wearing a lampshade hat woven with rush.’ He added, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘It should be said that he was a rather extraordinary individual.’ Certainly Ninagawa lived in extraordinary times. From our perspective, the Meiji Restoration – the moment on 23 October 1868 when Japan decisively turned from closed, feudal Tokugawa shogunate into a rapid