Il Giappone in Miniatura. Le cartoline illustrate giapponesi dal 1898 al 1950. Japan In Miniature. Japanese Picture Postcards from 1898 to 1950

"The world of Japanese postcards now strikes us as a great whirl of images, as it were, of magic miniatures in watercolour that seem to convey a thrill and move through a dream, in comparison with the postcards of the contemporary, repetitious series of views of European cities. Postcards are in good health, have their own real, independent place in that "world of signs" that the "light room", as Roland Barthes called it, has given us of Japan and its tiny miniature universe.
The centre of this landscape universe, the point from which everything seems to start and to which everything seems to return, is always the view of Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of Japan. Mount Fuji is the two-thousand-years-old icon of this world of images, as in the West the Egyptian Pyramids or the Greek Parthenon; but unlike these two icons, which are man-made, it is an icon of nature, and one never suspects that this too - a mountain - is a cultural representation: the views of Mount Fuji impose themselves on our sight, like the sea, a forest, a river and a storm, snow and rain, like an essence that existed before man and will outlive man's disappearance, as if it contained the secret of the universe and at the same time were divine in its essence. But this too, all in all, is a myth, a symbol of a changeless nature: ideal, but not true. Mount Fuji, too, like all the rest, remains a vision". Marco Fagioli