Kusakabe Kimbei, old jap. photography

Kusakabe Kimbei, one of the most accomplished Japanese photographers of his time, operated a studio in Yokohama from the early 1880s until 1913.
He learned photography as an apprentice to Baron von Stillfried, an Austrian who worked in Japan from 1872 to 1883.
After von Stillfried left Japan, Kimbei acquired many of the glass plate negatives of his teacher along with some of the plates of well-known photographer Felice Beato. Kimbei reprinted the work of Beato and von Stillfried along with his own work and included them in his albums.
As the protégé of von Stillfried, Kusakabe Kimbei continued the tradition of the psychological studio portrait and recorded scenic views of the country while he developed his own Japanese sense of photography. Like postcards today, his work was collected by tourists and exported for sale as curiosities to those who could not visit Japan.
Kimbei's photographs were produced using an albumen printing process that utilized egg whites as a suspension medium for the light-sensitive photographic emulsion. The Japanese perfected the art of hand-coloring photographs, a process that did not gain the acceptance of photographers and critics in the West at that time.

from:
Philipp March Old Japan Photography