Browse UBC's John Cooper Robinson Photo Collection here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n The Canadian Anglican missionary J. Cooper Robinson (1859-1926), an avid amateur photographer, left behind thousands of photographs documenting over 35 years of missionary work in central Japan, mainly in Nagoya between 1888 and 1925.[footnote]Robinson worked primarily in Nagoya and Gifu, but he also spent some time in Niigata (425 km north) and Hiroshima (480 km south). \u201cThe Rev. John Cooper Robinson, D.D.\u201d The Japan Mission Year-Book, no. 25<\/em> (1927). 339.[\/footnote]<\/span>\u00a0In 2014, some of Robinson\u2019s descendants donated almost the entirety of a private collection \u2013 approximately four thousand images recorded on glass plates, film negatives, printed pictures, and postcards \u2013 to the University of British Columbia Rare Books and Special Collections library.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_356\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"195\"] This essay is primarily interested in the collection as a private archive: Robinson\u2019s photographs spent most of their time in his and then his family\u2019s possession. As historian Kevin Coleman argues, private and public photo archives have different goals, and it is worth reflecting on not only author and subject but also archival practices when analyzing photo collections. While a creator of private collections may \u201ckeep a copy of almost every negative that he produced,\u201d Coleman contends that public collections, made by companies, photojournalists, or governments are \u201cthe result of an aggressive attempt to shape\u201d what outsiders see.[footnote]Kevin Coleman, A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016), 16.[\/footnote]<\/span><\/p>\r\n The Robinson photographs offer a unique window into life in the Meiji and Taish\u014d eras precisely because the audience and purpose of these photographs are different from many other photos that remain from this period. Robinson surely had motives when taking pictures, but they were significantly different from those of western travellers or missionaries who intended to exhibit or publish their pictures and different from those of Japanese officials or companies that also wanted to document the lives of working and rural people. Cooper Robinson shared the pictures with a small group of people soon after he took them. Yet he saved glass plates or negatives rather than easy-to-view prints, and this suggests that he did not use his private archive to repeatedly share images with others. The glass plates and negatives were stored in a series of family homes, rarely viewed after the photographer died in 1926.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_357\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"162\"] Robinson had a series of themes that he found worthy of documentation. Workers and rural peoples, converts to his Anglican mission, and personal relationships \u2013 with his Japanese colleagues and his family \u2013 take up a large part of the UBC collection. Shots of Japanese officials, modern cities, industry, historic buildings, or beautiful landscapes do not figure prominently in his project. Robinson, either consciously or not, altered and enlarged a specific image of Japan, whether for himself, his missionary colleagues in Japan, or Anglicans and others back in Canada. But in so doing, he presented one possible vision while hiding other possible ways of seeing the Japanese and the country.<\/p>\r\n Robinson\u2019s intended audience for the photographs that remained in his private collection is unclear. Was he simply collecting memories as an amateur photographer? The audience of the more than two-hundred postcard prints he had made was surely different than the glass plates in the collection. Did he take many of the pictures with the intention of showing them to Canadians during his furloughs as a way to justify his missionary activities and to raise money for future Anglican activities in Japan? Based on the pictures he took of Canada during his stay in 1919 (also included in the UBC collection), Robinson visited many parts of the country during his furloughs. Did he meet with people to discuss missionary work and did he show his pictures widely during these ephemeral moments? While the vast corpus gives us hints that the photographer knew many of his subjects, he also likely convinced people he did not know or did not know well to pose for the camera.<\/p>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_358\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"] Cooper Robinson was born near Blenheim, Ontario in 1859 and graduated from Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto in 1886.[footnote]\u201cRev. John Cooper Robinson, D.D.,\u201d The Canadian Churchman, July 22, 1926, 476.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span>His wife Bessie (n\u00e9e Poynton)[footnote]\u201cIn Memoriam: Mrs. J. Cooper Robinson,\u201d The Canadian Churchman, November 20, 1919, 1.[\/footnote] was born in Nottingham, England in 1858 and immigrated to Toronto in 1881.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote] Together, they went to Japan only months after their marriage in 1888. Robinson worked for thirty-seven years as a missionary in the country with furloughs to Canada every five or six years.[footnote]\u201cThe Rev. John Cooper Robinson, D.D.\u201d The Japan Mission Year-Book, no. 25 (1927). 338-39.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span>Their three children were born in Japan: Lucy Winifred in 1890, Hilda in 1891, and Cuthbert in 1893.[footnote]\u201cDescendants of John Robinson, born 1811.\u201d www.ancestry.ca.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span>It was through Cuthbert\u2019s son Stuart, and then ultimately Stuart\u2019s daughter Jill, that this private collection was preserved and then donated to UBC in 2014.<\/p>\r\n The expanded Robinson family \u2013 now five instead of two \u2013 came (back) to Canada for their first furlough in 1894. The family again travelled to Canada in 1902, with Bessie in ill health. Cooper returned to Japan that same year while the rest of the family stayed in Toronto due to Bessie\u2019s health and for their children\u2019s education. After ten years of living apart, Bessie returned to Japan in 1912 accompanied by Cooper and one daughter, the 21-year-old Hilda, but not the 22-year-old Lucy Winifred nor the 19-year-old Cuthbert.[footnote]\u201cIn Memoriam: Mrs. J. Cooper Robinson,\u201d The Canadian Churchman<\/em>, November 20, 1919, 3.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span>Bessie spent another six years in Japan before returning to Ontario with Cooper on a furlough in 1918; she died a year later while still in Canada.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote] Cooper and his daughter Hilda returned to Japan in 1919. Cooper came to Canada on a furlough in 1925, and he died unexpectedly in Ontario in 1926.<\/p>\r\n Part of the collection includes pictures \u2013 particularly of the young Robinson family in the 1890s \u2013 taken at Japanese studios (see\u00a0<\/span>Figure 1<\/strong>). Other pictures, which appear to be taken with Cooper\u2019s camera, include him as the subject, and in these cases there are other photographers (see\u00a0<\/span>Figure 2<\/strong>). Yet in all three cases (studios, pictures by Cooper, and pictures taken by others using his camera), the collection maintains a certain consistency of documenting personal relationships within the family, and with Japanese converts and other western missionaries. Based on the photos in this collection, it appears that Robinson took up photography in earnest during the ten years he worked in Japan without his wife and children (1902-1912). Since the collection consists largely of glass plates and to a lesser extent film negatives, few of the pictures are labelled.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_359\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"550\"] Canadian Anglicans concentrated in the Nagoya region from Bessie and Cooper\u2019s start in 1888. By the 1920s, this group ran several kindergartens, training schools, and a school for the blind in what became the Anglican Diocese of Mid-Japan.[footnote]Hamish Ion, \u201cThe Missionary Connection: Ambassadors of the Cross: Canadian Missionaries in Japan,\u201d 30-47, in Canada and Japan in the Twentieth Century<\/em>, edited by John Schultz and Kimitada Miwa (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), 32; John Meehan, The Dominion and the Rising Sun: Canada Encounters Japan, 1929-41 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 23.[\/footnote]<\/span>\u00a0Many images in the UBC collection, such as\u00a0<\/span>Figure 3<\/strong>\u00a0of the students at the school for the blind, are of the institutions that Anglican missionaries established and of the Japanese people who used them.<\/span><\/p>\r\n In his book,\u00a0<\/span>The Island Empire of the East:<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Being a Short History of Japan and Missionary Work therein with special reference to the Mission of the M.S.C.C<\/em>\u00a0(Toronto, 1912), Robinson tells Canadian readers about his success, but he also reveals that a certain amount of isolation shaped his time in Japan. This point can cast more light on the people and things that Robinson photographed and the Japanese subjects who volunteered for the camera. Indeed, many of the subjects of his photographs are the small group of Japanese Christians and foreign missionaries with whom Cooper Robinson spent most of his time (see\u00a0<\/span>Figures 4 and 5<\/strong>). Although he framed his work in a positive light, he reported to Canadian readers about the slow progress of evangelizing. When he returned to Canada on his first furlough in 1894 after spending almost six years in the country, he reported that he had baptized thirty-seven people, \u201cfour of whom afterwards became his fellow-workers in the Gospel.\u201d[footnote]J. Cooper Robinson. The Island Empire of the East: Being a Short History of Japan and Missionary Work therein with special reference to the Mission of the M.S.C.C. (Toronto: The Prayer and Study Union of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada, 1912), 125.[\/footnote]<\/span>\u00a0In the missions in Toyohashi (68 km southeast of Nagoya) and Ono (135 km north of Nagoya) that Robinson was involved in, he reported that over the course of sixteen years (between 1896 and 1912), sixty-five people had become baptized Christians.[footnote]Ibid., 134.[\/footnote]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_360\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"213\"] Robinson\u2019s pictures depict a broad range of themes relevant to both foreign missionaries in early twentieth-century Japan and the country more generally. There are portraits and group shots of Japanese people, and many of those people are likely \u2013 though not clearly \u2013 Japanese Christians. Yet there is also a very large number of smiling vendors, peasants, and workers, and their connection to a Christian denomination or even their relationship with Robinson is less clear. According to historian Margaret Prang, \u201cProtestantism in Japan early assumed the dominantly urban, educated, middle-class character it retained throughout the twentieth century.\u201d[footnote]Margaret Prang, A Heart at Leisure from Itself: Caroline Macdonald of Japan<\/em> (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), 24; Prang notes that \u201cformer samurai\u201d and their descendants \u201cconstituted a large majority of the ministers and lay leaders of the churches, [and] they also accounted for as much as 40 per cent of the total membership (75 per cent in Tokyo), although they were less than 6 per cent of the population [of Japan]\u201d (Margaret Prang, A Heart at Leisure from Itself: Caroline Macdonald of Japan<\/em> [Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995], 24).[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n Some of Robinson\u2019s Japanese subjects were fellow Anglicans, with whom he clearly had a personal rapport, and apparently fit Prang\u2019s point about middle-class status. Yet many of Robinson\u2019s subjects were poor peasants or street vendors, and are likely people who were not Christian converts and with whom he did not have a personal relationship (see\u00a0<\/span>Figures 6, 7, and 8<\/strong>). Those pictures in particular contain a layer of Orientalism and a belief in Western superiority. Susan Sontag has stressed that \u201cTo photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge\u2014and, therefore, like power.\u201d[footnote]Susan Sontag, On Photography<\/em> (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990), 4.[\/footnote]<\/a><\/a><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_362\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"500\"] Nevertheless, the agency of the subjects \u2013 even the peasants and workers who found their way into Cooper Robinson\u2019s pictures \u2013 should not be overlooked. The photographer offered these subjects the opportunity to be remembered and to interact with modern technology. To some extent, his subjects may have also known that they would travel, through Robinson\u2019s glass plates or prints, back to Canada and would shape Canadians\u2019 ideas about Japan. Kevin Coleman stresses that rather than seeing a photographer\u2019s subjects as victims of asymmetrical power, \u201c[t]he simple fact that this image exists points to the way that photography can be used by otherwise marginalized people to make modest claims to dignity and to thereby create new ways of thinking, speaking, and acting\u2026Photography enabled the excluded\u2026to see themselves in a new light and to make themselves visible to others.\u201d[footnote]Kevin Coleman, A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a Banana Republic<\/em> (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016), 4.[\/footnote]\u00a0 Robinson\u2019s act of photographing and saving the images was itself an act of empowering a marginalized subject. Coleman adds that while photography has been \u201ca means of surveillance, discipline, and classification,\u201d[footnote]Coleman, 28.[\/footnote]<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>it also \u201callowed people with little power or influence to rearrange the signs of their exclusion and purported inferiority such that they could then see themselves, and others could see them, as worthy of respect.\u201d[footnote]Coleman, 4.[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n Family is another important part of the J. Cooper Robinson collection at UBC. There are many portraits of him and his immediate family on their own or with Japanese friends or colleagues (see\u00a0<\/span>Figures 2, 4, and 9<\/strong>). Hilda Robinson appears in several photos with Japanese women of a similar age (see\u00a0<\/span>Figure 10<\/strong>). The pictures of Robinson himself are generally of a middle-aged man with a grey beard and grey hair. Photographs of his daughter, Hilda, outnumber her two siblings to an astonishing degree. Lucy and Cuthbert left Japan in 1902 to attend high school and later university in Toronto; Hilda did the same but returned to Japan in 1912. Lucy and Cuthbert\u2019s absence and Hilda\u2019s presence date most of the photographs between 1912 and 1925, the years between Hilda\u2019s return to Japan and Cooper\u2019s departure.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_365\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"] The J. Cooper Robinson collection at UBC offers students and researchers several important perspectives on Japanese society, western missionaries, and Canadian internationalism between 1888 and 1925. This private collection offers glimpses of life, work, and landscapes in Nagoya and environs, but the \u201cdouble testimony\u201d of the photograph also tells us about the photographer himself and about the life and a broader history of Canadian missionary activity in Japan.<\/p>\r\n As a history professor, I am particularly compelled by the significance of the Robinson collection as a private archive. I am also compelled by a group of scholars\u2019 arguments about the agency of the photographic subject rather than the asymmetrical power relations that were also part and parcel of early photography.[footnote]Coleman, A Camera in the Garden of Eden; Greg Grandin, \u201cCan the Subaltern Be Seen? Photography and the Affects of Nationalism,\u201d Hispanic American Historical Review<\/em> 84 (2004): 83\u2013112.[\/footnote]\u00a0<\/span>Robinson\u2019s subjects were active participants in forging an image of themselves, their regions, and their lifestyles. Despite his own proselytizing motives, he brought a large number of marginalized peoples into the public eye. He helped them be seen and let them pose and show themselves to an audience of which they had at least some degree of knowledge and about which they perhaps had a desire to know more.<\/p>\r\n Yet as the great-great-grandson of the photographer, researching and writing this essay has been an instructive exercise in subjectivity and objectivity. This personal connection has surely allowed me to be more sensitive to the importance of family relations in the photographer\u2019s work and to think about who\u2019s who and how that mattered. It has also led me to a research methodology that I have not had with other projects. Having the e-mail addresses of Cuthbert\u2019s and Lucy Winifred\u2019s grandchildren has allowed me to check facts. And having an uncle who sent me Bessie\u2019s and Cooper\u2019s obituaries, a father who mailed me a copy of\u00a0<\/span>The Island Empire of the East,<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>and an aunt who added important, often personal information about the lives of Bessie, Lucy Winifred, and Hilda sped things up in helpful ways and enriched my analysis. Yet my personal \u2013 albeit very distant \u2013 relationship with this historical subject has also made me uneasy as a historian. Historians cling to a belief in some degree of objectivity \u2013 or shy away from flagging our subjectivity \u2013 more than in other disciplines. Yet the act of researching and writing something where I cannot get around my own subject position has been far more help than hindrance.<\/p>","rendered":" Benjamin Bryce |\u00a0<\/strong>University of Northern British Columbia<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Browse UBC’s John Cooper Robinson Photo Collection here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n The Canadian Anglican missionary J. Cooper Robinson (1859-1926), an avid amateur photographer, left behind thousands of photographs documenting over 35 years of missionary work in central Japan, mainly in Nagoya between 1888 and 1925.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0In 2014, some of Robinson\u2019s descendants donated almost the entirety of a private collection \u2013 approximately four thousand images recorded on glass plates, film negatives, printed pictures, and postcards \u2013 to the University of British Columbia Rare Books and Special Collections library.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This essay is primarily interested in the collection as a private archive: Robinson\u2019s photographs spent most of their time in his and then his family\u2019s possession. As historian Kevin Coleman argues, private and public photo archives have different goals, and it is worth reflecting on not only author and subject but also archival practices when analyzing photo collections. While a creator of private collections may \u201ckeep a copy of almost every negative that he produced,\u201d Coleman contends that public collections, made by companies, photojournalists, or governments are \u201cthe result of an aggressive attempt to shape\u201d what outsiders see.[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n The Robinson photographs offer a unique window into life in the Meiji and Taish\u014d eras precisely because the audience and purpose of these photographs are different from many other photos that remain from this period. Robinson surely had motives when taking pictures, but they were significantly different from those of western travellers or missionaries who intended to exhibit or publish their pictures and different from those of Japanese officials or companies that also wanted to document the lives of working and rural people. Cooper Robinson shared the pictures with a small group of people soon after he took them. Yet he saved glass plates or negatives rather than easy-to-view prints, and this suggests that he did not use his private archive to repeatedly share images with others. The glass plates and negatives were stored in a series of family homes, rarely viewed after the photographer died in 1926.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Robinson had a series of themes that he found worthy of documentation. Workers and rural peoples, converts to his Anglican mission, and personal relationships \u2013 with his Japanese colleagues and his family \u2013 take up a large part of the UBC collection. Shots of Japanese officials, modern cities, industry, historic buildings, or beautiful landscapes do not figure prominently in his project. Robinson, either consciously or not, altered and enlarged a specific image of Japan, whether for himself, his missionary colleagues in Japan, or Anglicans and others back in Canada. But in so doing, he presented one possible vision while hiding other possible ways of seeing the Japanese and the country.<\/p>\n Robinson\u2019s intended audience for the photographs that remained in his private collection is unclear. Was he simply collecting memories as an amateur photographer? The audience of the more than two-hundred postcard prints he had made was surely different than the glass plates in the collection. Did he take many of the pictures with the intention of showing them to Canadians during his furloughs as a way to justify his missionary activities and to raise money for future Anglican activities in Japan? Based on the pictures he took of Canada during his stay in 1919 (also included in the UBC collection), Robinson visited many parts of the country during his furloughs. Did he meet with people to discuss missionary work and did he show his pictures widely during these ephemeral moments? While the vast corpus gives us hints that the photographer knew many of his subjects, he also likely convinced people he did not know or did not know well to pose for the camera.<\/p>\n Cooper Robinson was born near Blenheim, Ontario in 1859 and graduated from Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto in 1886.[3]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>His wife Bessie (n\u00e9e Poynton)[4]<\/sup><\/a> was born in Nottingham, England in 1858 and immigrated to Toronto in 1881.[5]<\/sup><\/a> Together, they went to Japan only months after their marriage in 1888. Robinson worked for thirty-seven years as a missionary in the country with furloughs to Canada every five or six years.[6]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>Their three children were born in Japan: Lucy Winifred in 1890, Hilda in 1891, and Cuthbert in 1893.[7]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>It was through Cuthbert\u2019s son Stuart, and then ultimately Stuart\u2019s daughter Jill, that this private collection was preserved and then donated to UBC in 2014.<\/p>\n The expanded Robinson family \u2013 now five instead of two \u2013 came (back) to Canada for their first furlough in 1894. The family again travelled to Canada in 1902, with Bessie in ill health. Cooper returned to Japan that same year while the rest of the family stayed in Toronto due to Bessie\u2019s health and for their children\u2019s education. After ten years of living apart, Bessie returned to Japan in 1912 accompanied by Cooper and one daughter, the 21-year-old Hilda, but not the 22-year-old Lucy Winifred nor the 19-year-old Cuthbert.[8]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>Bessie spent another six years in Japan before returning to Ontario with Cooper on a furlough in 1918; she died a year later while still in Canada.[9]<\/sup><\/a> Cooper and his daughter Hilda returned to Japan in 1919. Cooper came to Canada on a furlough in 1925, and he died unexpectedly in Ontario in 1926.<\/p>\n Part of the collection includes pictures \u2013 particularly of the young Robinson family in the 1890s \u2013 taken at Japanese studios (see\u00a0<\/span>Figure 1<\/strong>). Other pictures, which appear to be taken with Cooper\u2019s camera, include him as the subject, and in these cases there are other photographers (see\u00a0<\/span>Figure 2<\/strong>). Yet in all three cases (studios, pictures by Cooper, and pictures taken by others using his camera), the collection maintains a certain consistency of documenting personal relationships within the family, and with Japanese converts and other western missionaries. Based on the photos in this collection, it appears that Robinson took up photography in earnest during the ten years he worked in Japan without his wife and children (1902-1912). Since the collection consists largely of glass plates and to a lesser extent film negatives, few of the pictures are labelled.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Canadian Anglicans concentrated in the Nagoya region from Bessie and Cooper\u2019s start in 1888. By the 1920s, this group ran several kindergartens, training schools, and a school for the blind in what became the Anglican Diocese of Mid-Japan.[10]<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0Many images in the UBC collection, such as\u00a0<\/span>Figure 3<\/strong>\u00a0of the students at the school for the blind, are of the institutions that Anglican missionaries established and of the Japanese people who used them.<\/span><\/p>\n In his book,\u00a0<\/span>The Island Empire of the East:<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Being a Short History of Japan and Missionary Work therein with special reference to the Mission of the M.S.C.C<\/em>\u00a0(Toronto, 1912), Robinson tells Canadian readers about his success, but he also reveals that a certain amount of isolation shaped his time in Japan. This point can cast more light on the people and things that Robinson photographed and the Japanese subjects who volunteered for the camera. Indeed, many of the subjects of his photographs are the small group of Japanese Christians and foreign missionaries with whom Cooper Robinson spent most of his time (see\u00a0<\/span>Figures 4 and 5<\/strong>). Although he framed his work in a positive light, he reported to Canadian readers about the slow progress of evangelizing. When he returned to Canada on his first furlough in 1894 after spending almost six years in the country, he reported that he had baptized thirty-seven people, \u201cfour of whom afterwards became his fellow-workers in the Gospel.\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0In the missions in Toyohashi (68 km southeast of Nagoya) and Ono (135 km north of Nagoya) that Robinson was involved in, he reported that over the course of sixteen years (between 1896 and 1912), sixty-five people had become baptized Christians.[12]<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Robinson\u2019s pictures depict a broad range of themes relevant to both foreign missionaries in early twentieth-century Japan and the country more generally. There are portraits and group shots of Japanese people, and many of those people are likely \u2013 though not clearly \u2013 Japanese Christians. Yet there is also a very large number of smiling vendors, peasants, and workers, and their connection to a Christian denomination or even their relationship with Robinson is less clear. According to historian Margaret Prang, \u201cProtestantism in Japan early assumed the dominantly urban, educated, middle-class character it retained throughout the twentieth century.\u201d[13]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Some of Robinson\u2019s Japanese subjects were fellow Anglicans, with whom he clearly had a personal rapport, and apparently fit Prang\u2019s point about middle-class status. Yet many of Robinson\u2019s subjects were poor peasants or street vendors, and are likely people who were not Christian converts and with whom he did not have a personal relationship (see\u00a0<\/span>Figures 6, 7, and 8<\/strong>). Those pictures in particular contain a layer of Orientalism and a belief in Western superiority. Susan Sontag has stressed that \u201cTo photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge\u2014and, therefore, like power.\u201d[14]<\/sup><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nevertheless, the agency of the subjects \u2013 even the peasants and workers who found their way into Cooper Robinson\u2019s pictures \u2013 should not be overlooked. The photographer offered these subjects the opportunity to be remembered and to interact with modern technology. To some extent, his subjects may have also known that they would travel, through Robinson\u2019s glass plates or prints, back to Canada and would shape Canadians\u2019 ideas about Japan. Kevin Coleman stresses that rather than seeing a photographer\u2019s subjects as victims of asymmetrical power, \u201c[t]he simple fact that this image exists points to the way that photography can be used by otherwise marginalized people to make modest claims to dignity and to thereby create new ways of thinking, speaking, and acting\u2026Photography enabled the excluded\u2026to see themselves in a new light and to make themselves visible to others.\u201d[15]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Robinson\u2019s act of photographing and saving the images was itself an act of empowering a marginalized subject. Coleman adds that while photography has been \u201ca means of surveillance, discipline, and classification,\u201d[16]<\/sup><\/a><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>it also \u201callowed people with little power or influence to rearrange the signs of their exclusion and purported inferiority such that they could then see themselves, and others could see them, as worthy of respect.\u201d[17]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Family is another important part of the J. Cooper Robinson collection at UBC. There are many portraits of him and his immediate family on their own or with Japanese friends or colleagues (see\u00a0<\/span>Figures 2, 4, and 9<\/strong>). Hilda Robinson appears in several photos with Japanese women of a similar age (see\u00a0<\/span>Figure 10<\/strong>). The pictures of Robinson himself are generally of a middle-aged man with a grey beard and grey hair. Photographs of his daughter, Hilda, outnumber her two siblings to an astonishing degree. Lucy and Cuthbert left Japan in 1902 to attend high school and later university in Toronto; Hilda did the same but returned to Japan in 1912. Lucy and Cuthbert\u2019s absence and Hilda\u2019s presence date most of the photographs between 1912 and 1925, the years between Hilda\u2019s return to Japan and Cooper\u2019s departure.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"This](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/meijiat150\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/445\/2018\/06\/Bryce-Thumb-e1529457155213.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n
\r\n
\r\n<\/a> Figure 1.<\/strong> Photographer K. Miyashita Honmachi Sanchiome Nagoya Aichi, late 1890s. Source: Author\u2019s personal collection. From left to right: Hilda, Cooper, Lucy Winifred, Bessie, Cuthbert.[\/caption]\r\n<\/a> Figure 1 Reverse.<\/strong> Author\u2019s personal collection.[\/caption]\r\n<\/a> Figure 2.<\/strong> Bessie, Cooper, and Hilda in garden, taken between 1912 and 1918.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201cFamily in back garden, Sh[inokabi] Cho.\u201d RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-0114.[\/caption]\r\n<\/a> Figure 3.<\/strong> Students at the Gifu school for the blind, 1921.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201cBlind school grads 1921.\u201d RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-0284.[\/caption]\r\n<\/a> Figure 4.<\/strong> Robinson with Japanese minister and followers, 1920s.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201cJC Robinson and Japanese men.\u201d RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-0136.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_361\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"]<\/a> Figure 5.<\/strong> Scenes from Takaragawa trip, 1921.<\/em> \u201cScenes on Takaragawa[?] trip [group of Japanese men and women].\u201d Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-0449.[\/caption]\r\nRobinson\u2019s Photographs<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n
<\/a> Figure 6.<\/strong> Men carrying cocoons and Hachiman, 1920.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201c[Men] carrying cocoons. Hachiman, K[?].\u201d RSBC-ARC-1757-PH-0343.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_363\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"500\"]<\/a> Figure 7.<\/strong> Japanese Woman Carrying Babies, 1905.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201cJapanese girls and woman carrying babies on backs.\u201d RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-1620.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_364\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"]<\/a> Figure 8.<\/strong> Children in Canal by Field, 1908.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201cChildren in canal by field.\u201d RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-0043.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/a> Figure 9.<\/strong> Lucy Winifred at 10 months on O Ei\u2019s back, 1891.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201cLucy on O Ei\u2019s back, 10 mo[nth]s.\u201d RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-3028.[\/caption]<\/div>\r\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_366\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"212\"]
<\/a> Figure 10.<\/strong> Hilda, after 1912.<\/em> Source: UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. \u201cHilda Robinson in Japanese dress with Japanese woman.\u201d RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-1233, Print, 20-013.[\/caption]\r\nJ. Cooper Robinson: A Canadian Missionary and Photographer in Japan, 1888-1925<\/h1>\n
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\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Robinson\u2019s Photographs<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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