The exhibition and accompanying book Japan on a Glass Plate showcases over 140 unique photographs from nineteenth-century Japan, a nation that is in full transformation at that time. The video below shows the first venue of the exhibition, the beautiful Sieboldhuis in Leiden (Sept 2023–March 2024). The author of our book, historian and Japan-expert Sebastian Dobson, tells us more about the Kurokawa collection, the Swiss private collection from which the photographs are drawn, and puts the images in a broader historical context.