was a pioneering Japanese photographer. Although he is much less well known than his contemporaries

Shimooka Renjō was a Japanese photographer''328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers'' / ''Nihon shashinka jiten'' (). Kyoto: Tankōsha, 2000. . Despite the alternative title in English, this book is in Japanese only. and was one of the first professional photo ...

and

Ueno Hikoma was a pioneer Japanese photographer, born in Nagasaki. He is noted for his fine portraits, often of important Japanese and foreign figures, and for his excellent landscapes, particularly of Nagasaki and its surroundings. Ueno was a major figure ...

, he is important for being the first Japanese professional photographer, having established a

photographic studio A photographic studio is often a business owned and represented by one or more photographers, possibly accompanied by assistants and pupils, who create and sell their own and sometimes others’ photographs. Since the early years of the 20th ce ...

Edo Edo ( ja, , , "bay-entrance" or "estuary"), also romanized as Jedo, Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of Tokyo. Edo, formerly a ''jōkamachi'' (castle town) centered on Edo Castle located in Musashi Province, became the ''de facto'' capital of ...

(now Tokyo) in 1860 or 1861. Ukai was born in what is now

Ishioka 260px, Ishioka City Hall is a city located in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 72,351 in 28,291 households and a population density of 336 persons per km². The percentage of the population aged over 65 was 33. ...

Ibaraki Prefecture is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located in the Kantō region of Honshu. Ibaraki Prefecture has a population of 2,871,199 (1 June 2019) and has a geographic area of . Ibaraki Prefecture borders Fukushima Prefecture to the north, ...

, the youngest of four brothers. The family was well-off, Ukai's father being a finance commissioner for the ''

daimyō were powerful Japanese magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji era, Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast, hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and n ...

'' Matsudaira Jijū Yorisaki. When Ukai was thirteen, he was adopted by the

sake Sake, also spelled saké ( ; also referred to as Japanese rice wine), is an alcoholic beverage of Japanese origin made by fermenting rice that has been polished to remove the bran. Despite the name ''Japanese rice wine'', sake, and indee ...

supplier to another daimyō, Mikawaya, and he thus became a merchant. Ukai developed an interest in art and antiques after coming to know the ''

bunjinga , also known as , was a school of Japanese painting which flourished in the late Edo period among artists who considered themselves literati, or intellectuals. While each of these artists was, almost by definition, unique and independent, they ...

'' painter

Tani Bunchō was a Japanese literati (''bunjin'') painter and poet. Biography He was the son of the poet Tani Rokkoku (1729–1809). As his family were retainers of the Tayasu Family of descendants of the eighth Tokugawa ''shōgun'', Bunchō inherited ...

, and in 1831 he left the sake business to become a full-time artist.Bennett, 61. In 1859, with the intention of learning photographic technique, Ukai travelled to

Yokohama is the second-largest city in Japan by population and the most populous municipality of Japan. It is the capital city and the most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a 2020 population of 3.8 million. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of To ...

, one of the few Japanese cities to which foreigners had access and therefore (with

Nagasaki is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. It became the sole port used for trade with the Portuguese and Dutch during the 16th through 19th centuries. The Hidden Christian Sites in the ...

) one of the early sites of photography in Japan. Ukai was taught by American photographer Orrin Freeman, whose camera and equipment he eventually may have bought. In 1860 or 1861 he moved to Edo and set up a studio which he called ''Eishin-dō'' () that was mentioned in a late 1861 publication titled ''Ō-Edo tōsei hanakurabe shohen''. By operating in Edo, a city that excluded foreigners, Ukai was unlike Shimooka, Ueno and others whose clientele was predominantly foreign residents and visitors. Instead, Ukai photographed those few Japanese who both knew of photography and could afford to sit for a portrait. Within a few years, Ukai managed to produce over two hundred

ambrotype The ambrotype (from grc, ἀμβροτός — “immortal”, and — “impression”) also known as a collodion positive in the UK, is a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process. Like a pr ...

portraits of members of the aristocracy. He closed his studio in 1867. In 1879 Ukai worked for the Treasury Printing Office, travelling through western Japan for five months with the Office's director, inspecting and photographing antiquities. The findings of this research were published between 1880 and 1881 as ''Kokka Yohō'' (), featuring lithographs derived from photographs by Ukai. In 1883 Ukai buried several hundred of his glass negatives at

Yanaka Cemetery is a large cemetery located north of Ueno in Yanaka 7-chome, Taito, Tokyo, Japan. The Yanaka sector of Taito is one of the few Tokyo neighborhoods in which the old Shitamachi atmosphere can still be felt. The cemetery is famous for its beautifu ...

in Tokyo. A monument placed at the site included carved biographical details that were supplemented four years later when Ukai died and was himself interred at the spot. The glass negatives were unearthed in 1956 and reported in the periodical ''Sun Shashin Shimbun''. Of the many unattributed Japanese ambrotypes to have survived from the 1860s, some were probably produced by Ukai. One photograph that has been positively identified as his work is an 1863 portrait of Miura Shushin.Bennett, 62.

Notes

References

* Bennett, Terry. ''Photography in Japan: 1853–1912'' Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 2006. (hard) *''Nihon no shashinka'' () / ''Biographic Dictionary of Japanese Photography.'' Tokyo: Nichigai Associates, 2005. . Despite the English-language alternative title, all in Japanese. * ''Nihon shashinka jiten'' () / ''328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers.'' Kyoto: Tankōsha, 2000. . Despite the English-language alternative title, all in Japanese. {{DEFAULTSORT:Ukai, Gyokusen Japanese photographers Pioneers of photography Portrait photographers People of Meiji-period Japan Artists from Ibaraki Prefecture 1807 births 1887 deaths