Some 90 albumen-printed and hand-coloured photographs and five exquisite Japanese lacquer-covered albums from MUSEC’s Ceschin-Pilone Fagioli Collection were exhibited at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. The exhibition is entitled ‘Pigen og Parasollen’ (Girl with Parasol). The exhibition aims to explore Japanese culture and identity through a comparison between the refined hand-coloured albumen prints of the 19^th century (Yokohama shashin) and today’s snapshots taken in the popular photo booths (purikura). This is an innovative and, in some ways, provocative scientific project that introduces new elements in the interpretation of Japanese visual culture from a decidedly post-modern perspective. As a counterpoint to the main exhibition, there are a series of works of art and material culture, notebooks and woodcut prints from the collections of the National Museum of Denmark. The main subject of the museographic narrative are geishas, samurai, cherry blossoms and all the iconographic paraphernalia developed by the burgeoning photographic industry that established itself in the late 19^th century in major Japanese cities. Such images, much loved by western travellers, render a dreamy Japan, giving the sensation of a world suspended in an indefinite aura of ineffable perfection, of a marvellous but fragile exotic universe, destined to disappear with the Meiji Restoration, at the dawn of the new century. The same dreamlike atmosphere permeates the snapshots that today’s young Japanese love to take inside the purikuras and that visitors will be able to experience directly thanks to the presence on display of a photo booth kindly made available by the Furyo Corporation.