Shashin, the Japanese word that came to mean "photograph," was used quite differently when it first entered everyday language here. Derived from the two characters for "reflect" and "true," it arrived in the early Edo Period from China, where it was used to refer to portraits that were thought to express in some way the nature of the people they portrayed.
In Japan this sense was adapted, somewhat strangely, to refer to landscape paintings featuring flowers and birds. So when the first cameras and photography equipment arrived in Japan from Holland in 1848, the association of the word "shashin" and the object "photograph" was never even considered, said Fuminori Yokoe, chief curator at Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum and an expert on the history of photography in Japan.
" 'Shashin' paintings were supposed to include an expression of the internal aspect of a scene, while photographs were seen as something that was external, superficial," commented Yokoe, formerly chief curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. "It was seen as something that simply expressed a form, not anything within."