This is a good photograph of Japanese ‘Baron’ (or danshaku) Kentaro Kaneko. Actually, the Japanese usually use the family name first, so he was known as Kaneko Kentaro. An 1878 graduate of Harvard University, Kaneko was born in Fukuoka to a samurai family. Here he is resplendent in his military uniform, about 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War. Later in that year he was sent as special envoy to the United States, to entreat President Roosevelt (who had been his classmate at Harvard) to help negotiate an end to that war.

This photograph was taken in the Japanese studio of Riyo Maruki (born 1850 or 1854; died 1923), in Tokyo. A prominent photographer of that era, Maruki even took photographs of the Emperor, in 1888, and another in 1915. His studio in Tokyo was in operation from 1880 until his death in 1923.