Gyokei kinen Karafuto takushoku shashincho (Commemoration of the imperial visit: a photograph album of the colonization of Karafuto)

Printed photograph album commemorating the visit of the Crown Prince to the Karafuto prefecture in the summer of 1925, with preface by Okishima Kamazo and edited by Fujii Shoji, consisting of 20 plates with 73 black and white photographs tracing the Crown Prince's trip including visits to schools, agricultural research stations, naval bases, goverment offices, and mines, as well as his attendance at events staged for the visit, including athletic competitions, youth brigade assemblies, and dances; followed by 77 plates with 163 black and white photographs depicting various exterior and interior views of commercial and residential buildings in Karafuto, including lumber mills, colonial buildings, pig farms, agricultural operations, fisheries, shops, hospitals, hotels, and banks. Some scattered toning and soiling, minor foxing. Oblong 4to. Original silk-covered boards, silk shattered along spine, professionally repaired. Toyohara, Karafuto (Karafuto nichi nichi shinbunsha/Otz Shizuo) 1925. The album and the Crown Prince's visit commemorated the 20th year of Karafuto being part of Japanese territory. Karafuto, known as South Sakhalin, became a territory of the Empire of Japan in 1905 following the Russo-Japanese War, when part of Sakhalin was ceded from the Russian Empire in the Treaty of Portsmouth. The preface to this album explains how it commemorates the Crown Prince's visit (and later that of Emperor Showa, i.e. Hirohito) to Karafuto in the summer of 1925, during the last years of his father Emperor Taisho's reign. The visit was celebrated as a stimulus to the advance of the Japanese empire's northward expansion and an honor for the residents. The photographs within aimed to document the visit but also to show how the island had been developed over the past 20 years. Other similar albums were produced in advance of the imperial visit, but this album was unusual in that it included photographs of the visit itself. As of March 2024, OCLC locates only one holding of this title, at the National Diet Library in Japan.