Old Tokyo is a fascinating pictorial history of modern day Tokyo depicted through e-hagaki (Japanese postcards).

From the site:

With the establishment of the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s modernization began. Many modern practices, conveniences, and processes were imported, adopted, or acquired, including the Western-style printing press1 that would allow for the rapid reproduction and dissemination of artwork worldwide. Dutch traders introduced photography into Japan during the waning years of the Tokugawa shogunate; Japan’s modern postal service was formed in 1871. These three developments combined together to create the e-hagaki, the Japanese picture postcard, the earliest of which displayed a unique blending of Old and New Japan.

Similar in style to Western-style picture postcards then in vogue, e-hagaki combined Western technology with Japanese sensibilities. The subject matter was wide and varied: famous landmarks, tourist destinations, popular past times, scenes of everyday life, and important historical moments were all portrayed in color at a time when color photography did not exist. Long experience with traditional woodblock printing, ukiyo-e, enabled Japanese artists to reproduce subtle tinted colors, sometimes applied by hand, in ways that had not been before seen in the Western printing. Reproductions of ukiyo-e were realistically limited to a few hundred copies; the Western collotype printing process and, later, the offset printing press, made possible reproductions numbering in the thousands.

The results were a plethora of very beautiful, inspired artistic renditions that even the later development of the color lithographic process could not match. This site comprises a sampling of e-hagaki, and other Tokyo postcard images, from the early years of the 20th century.

The above picture is of Ginza crosing in 1903, the beginnings of what was to become Tokyo’s most sought after and expensive retails real estate - where today a square metre can set you back tens of thousands of dollars. In the background on the left hand side ofthe picture is the Hattori clock tower, home of K. Hattori & Co., the company who would later introduce later introduce the brand name “Seiko” to the world.

The above picture taken from the 1907 Meiji Industrial Exposition at Ueno Park shows the first swimming pool in Japan.

More awazing photos, maps and Tokyo history can be found at http://oldtokyo.com/