A recent Stamporama discussion about Japan being "dead" has led me to dig out some Japan items from my postal history collection. I collect Japan, and I do not think it is dead. I will start with an old registered cover. If anyone else would like to add their items, I would love to see them.
I just acquired my 3rd Japanese handpainted-highlights-on-brown-collotype postcard. (Yes, that's a thing ... by ikeyDecree.)
Sadly, the other two are buried in The Pile(s).
More sadly still, my scan does not begin to do justice to these very pretty cards:
- The brown collotype background is soft & mellow.
- The black highlights (eg, the trees, shrubs, etc) are thickly hand-inked, and very glossy.
- The gold highlights (eg, the nearer birds, the sail accents, the hut's roof, etc) are very pretty, very precise, and just about invisible in the scan. Ouch.
About the only thing I dare guess is that the cards are privately produced, as they are without indicia, etc.
But I am reliably informed that the vertical text reads "POST CARD" in a stylistically funky mix of Katakana and Hiragana.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
IkeyPikey, Thanks for adding to this thread. Your postcard is truly a thing of beauty. I do not have one in that style, but I have seen similar ones listed on eBay. I happened to be in an antiques store in Brookings, South Dakota, USA where I found the hand-painted watercolor postcard scanned below, which is another style from around 1905. The flag on the largest ship told me where this one originated.
Back in the early 60s, the French were mass-producing postcards that looked very much like original watercolors ... they were even printed on a very coarse white stock, adding to the effect.
Postcards bearing really pretty art are a treat-and-a-half.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
I love the artwork on old postcards myself. Here is a scan of the flip side, posted from Boston to Flushing, Long Island, New York, back in 1905. No 60s reprint here. (BenFranklin1902 will love this side, I am sure.) This is also on the rough artist's paper used for watercolors. This was sent as a Christmas greeting card here in the USA, but it has Japanese characters on both sides, if you look carefully.
I am not a foreign/WW collector, even though I do have a smattering of non-US interests;
I have a couple boxes of foreign covers that I keep for potential trades or giveaways.
Here are a couple I dug out from one box, from Japan.
The CRJM cover was given to me by the addressee's son, who is a good friend of mine;
his father has long-passed; his mom recently passed, and being that my friend knows I am a stamp collector,
he gave me a bunch of correspondence that his mom had saved of her husband's.
He was a Reverend and also a stamp collector who received mail from many countries.
Apparently, he did not organize any of what he had, so I had great fun going thru it all and discovering a lot of fun and interesting items!
Anyway, here are 2 covers that were in the hoard (his mom never threw anything away!);
This is the reverse of the second cover with a nice receiving mark;
Putting a different slant on this thread and the philately is dead thread it might be interesting to know how many Japanese "postcrossers" there are. Perhaps that is more their thing than conventional stamp collecting.
I recently acquired this postcard for my postal history collection. It was mailed from Yokohama, Japan to a doctor in Providence, Rhode Island, USA in December of 1896 promoting Colchi-Sal capsules by E. Fougera & Co. of New York. Clever advertising method!
stcards from the 1920s-30s available. 
