Fire or Fashion: Japanese Firemen's Coats of the 19th Century from the Steven and Jacqueline Mayro Strelitz Collection

In Japan’s ‘City of Fires’, firefighters wore elaborate coats decorated with scenes from Japanese legends. This book explores the world’s largest collection of these garments.

An old Japanese saying claims that ‘fights and fires are the flowers of Edo’. In Edo, the pre-1868 name for Tokyo, traditional wooden townhouses regularly suffered devastating blazes. Other densely populated areas of Japan experienced similar fates, but Edo stood out as a ‘City of Fires’. Against this backdrop, the fir...