Historians have expressed their delight at the discovery in London of one of the earliest photographs of a Japanese.
The photograph, taken either in 1851 or 1852 in San Francisco, is a portrait of Sentaro -- a Japanese sailor who was shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean in 1850 and taken to the United States.
It is one of only a small number of existing daguerreotype portraits of Japanese taken in America at that time.
The photograph will be auctioned at Christie's in London on May 11 and is expected to fetch up to 25,000 pounds (about 4.4 million yen).