Photo album and scrapbook compiled in postwar Japan and Thailand. de Barker, Marguerite - 1949

Tokyo, 1949. Hardcover. Excellent. Folio - over 12 - 15" tall. Folio (370 x 300 mm). Contemporary binding of elaborate, padded Japanese-style silk with silk ties. 36 heavy black paper leaves containing 289 photographs mounted with silver album corners (many taken by Barker but some being shots sold to tourists), 45 colour postcards, and numerous other postcards, cards, newspaper clippings, cocktail napkins, manuscript letters, telegrams, and advertising ephemera. Minor fraying and untying of the lower silk ties, a few items that were previously mounted now lacking, just a little minor rubbing and mild creasing to a small number of photos. Excellent condition. A remarkable photo album and scrapbook compiled in Occupied Japan and Thailand by a Far East Air Forces clerk, offering a historical record of a young American woman's adventures in a world newly opened to her. The compiler, Margaret Barker, graduated in Des Moines, Iowa and worked as a clerk and stenographer just before the Second World War began. When the US entered the war she joined the Air Force and worked in Washington D.C. and Pasadena, and then in Guam with the Far East Air Forces. Barker was stationed at the Tokyo headquarters in 1949, where she remained until the end of 1952, when she returned to the United States and lived in San Francisco, where she worked at the Hamilton Air Force Base. Barker was clearly an engaged traveler, and this album is a superb historical record of Occupied Japan. It includes pictures of the Army Hall in downtown Toyko where she worked, urban street scenes, women and children in traditional dress, day-to-day activities in small towns and rural villages, well-known tourist sites, friends and Air Force coworkers during leisure activities, and even the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two pages contain Barker's photographs of the Cherry Blossom festival, with a fabulous series depicting schoolchildren and their teachers in kimonos under a blossoming tree. Another series comprises six attractive and carefully staged photos of young women in traditional dress. Barker saved numerous photographs and postcards from trips around Japan, having visited the temples at Kyoto, the famous Nara Park deer, the smoking Mt. Aso (Japan's largest active volcano), and the iconic floating Torii gate of the Itsukushima Shrine. There are six large, engaging photos of cormorant fishers at work, including night shots (probably professional photographs for the tourist market). A full page (containing two photographs by Barker and six that are probably photos sold to tourists) is devoted to the Ama, the famous female pearl divers, probably on the Izu Peninsula. Ten pages hold photos from Barker's trip to Thailand with a group of FEAF employees, beginning with photos of Barker and a man, who appears frequently in the album and may have been her boyfriend Ed, in front of a plane at an airfield. There are numerous views of temples, street scenes, religious sculptures, and Bangkok street life. Among the ephemera are two newspaper clippings about the trip, one with a photo of Barker showing off a piece of souvenir jewellery to fellow FEAF employee who had also been on the trip. The final four pages contain photographs from a family visit in the midwest in 1952 or early 1953. Among the charming ephemera are postcards, greeting cards, cocktail napkins, engravings, business cards, and wedding invitations, and there is also a heartfelt telegram sent from Ed, then in San Francisco, on Valentine's Day, "Love to my Valentine. You are more than ever in my thoughts at this time. I wish we together on this special occasion". Overall a fascinating and evocative album documenting the life of an American woman in Occupied Japan.