Punch, or The London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and wood-engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 1850s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration. Artists at Punch included John Tenniel who, from 1850, was the chief cartoon artist at the magazine for over 50 years. The editors took the anarchic puppet Mr Punch, of Punch and Judy, as their mascot—the character appears in many magazine covers—with the character also an inspiration for the magazine's name.
Tōgō Heihachirō, served as a gensui or admiral of the fleet in the Imperial Japanese Navy and became one of Japan's greatest naval heroes. As Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, he successfully confined the Russian Pacific naval forces to Port Arthur before winning a decisive victory over a relieving fleet at Tsushima in May 1905. Western journalists called Tōgō "the Nelson of the East". He remains deeply revered as a national hero in Japan, with shrines and streets named in his honour.
Bakumatsu were the final years of the Edo period when the Tokugawa shogunate ended. Between 1853 and 1867, under foreign diplomatic and military pressure, Japan ended its isolationist foreign policy known as sakoku and changed from a feudal Tokugawa shogunate to the modern empire of the Meiji government. The major ideological-political divide during this period was between the pro-imperial nationalists called ishin shishi and the shogunate forces, which included the elite shinsengumi swordsmen.
Sir Ernest Mason Satow,, was a British diplomat, scholar and Japanologist. He is better known in Japan, where he was known as Satō Ainosuke, than in Britain or the other countries in which he served as a diplomat. He was a key figure in late 19th-century Anglo-Japanese relations.
Japan–United Kingdom relations are the bilateral and diplomatic relations between Japan and the United Kingdom.
William Willis was an Irish medical doctor who joined the British mission in Japan in 1861.
James Robertson (1813–1888) was an English gem and coin engraver who worked in the Mediterranean region, and who became a pioneering photographer working in the Crimea and possibly India. He is noted for his Orientalist photographs and for being one of the first war photographers.
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 in nineteenth-century Japanese photography as a commercially and artistically successful photographer and as an instructor.
Adolfo Farsari was an Italian photographer based in Yokohama, Japan. His studio, the last notable foreign-owned studio in Japan, was one of the country's largest and most prolific commercial photographic firms. Largely due to Farsari's exacting technical standards and his entrepreneurial abilities, it had a significant influence on the development of photography in Japan.
Felice Beato, also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting.
Pierre Joseph Rossier was a pioneering Swiss photographer whose albumen photographs, which include stereographs and cartes-de-visite, comprise portraits, cityscapes, and landscapes. He was commissioned by the London firm of Negretti and Zambra to travel to Asia and document the progress of the Anglo-French troops in the Second Opium War and, although he failed to join that military expedition, he remained in Asia for several years, producing the first commercial photographs of China, the Philippines, Japan and Siam. He was the first professional photographer in Japan, where he trained Ueno Hikoma, Maeda Genzō, Horie Kuwajirō, as well as lesser known members of the first generation of Japanese photographers. In Switzerland he established photographic studios in Fribourg and Einsiedeln, and he also produced images elsewhere in the country. Rossier is an important figure in the early history of photography not only because of his own images, but also because of the critical impact of his teaching in the early days of Japanese photography.
Georges Ferdinand Bigot was a French cartoonist, illustrator and artist. Although almost unknown in his native country, Bigot is famous in Japan for his satirical cartoons, which depict life in Meiji period Japan.
Ukai Gyokusen was a pioneering Japanese photographer. Although he is much less well known than his contemporaries Shimooka Renjō and Ueno Hikoma, he is important for being the first Japanese professional photographer, having established a photographic studio in Edo in 1860 or 1861.
Suzuki Shin'ichi was the younger of two Japanese photographers to bear that name.
Theodore Blake Wirgman was a British painter and etcher who moved to London, studied at the Royal Academy Schools, became a painter of history and genre subjects, and worked as a portrait artist for The Graphic. A number of these portraits are held at the National Portrait Gallery.
Utagawa Sadahide, also known as Gountei Sadahide, was a Japanese artist best known for his prints in the ukiyo-e style as a member of the Utagawa school. His prints covered a wide variety of genres; amongst his best known are his Yokohama-e pictures of foreigners in Yokohama in the 1860s, a period when he was a best-selling artist. He was a member of the Tokugawa shogunate's delegation to the International Exposition of 1867 in Paris.
The Japan Punch was a satirical comic magazine and journal that was authored, illustrated and published by English painter and cartoonist Charles Wirgman from 1862 to 1887. The publication reflected the social context of Bakumatsu Yokohama and often depicted the frustrations that emerged from conflicts between Japanese domestic politics and early foreign settlement life in Japan. It utilised cartoons to comment and critique the media and political landscape of the social and political issues of the Meiji era. It might have been influenced by another English magazine called Punch.
Frederick William Sutton was an English early amateur photographer and naval engineer best known for photographing in Meiji period Japan.
