On a visit to Yokohama's "Theater Street" (Isezakicho) in the early 1890s, Henry Finck, the music critic of the New York Evening Post from 1881-1924, watched "the wonders of electric light, telephone, [and] phonograph . . . [demonstrated] to gaping natives."
A face in a rictus of wonder might well symbolize the Japanese in the Meiji Era (1868-1912). Newfangled things were pouring through the treaty ports, foreign professors were teaching evolution and the like, and Japanese were translating books into their native tongue. There was much to inspire wonder.
Tokyo's theater street was Rokku, established in Asakusa in 1884 when the show tents of the Sensoji temple precincts were relocated there. In 1887 a timber-framed plaster Mount Fuji rose in Rokku, a spiral path leading to its 20-meter summit. But there were already Hokusai's celebrated Fuji woodblocks, and the mountain itself was visible from as close as Nihonbashi. Rokku's Fuji was already passe. The mountain came down in 1890.