Before photography could catch a snowflake, an Edo-era Japanese lord spent two decades drawing them by hand. Sekka Zusetsu (雪華図説), published in 1832, collects the results — eighty-six firsthand observations of “snow flowers,” plus a dozen reproduced from a 1779 German natural-history primer.
The author was Doi Toshitsura (1789–1848), a daimyō who ruled the Koga Domain in what is now Shimōsa Province, and probably the first person in Japan to study ice crystals under a microscope.
His method was patient and slightly absurd, and it is the best part of the story:
- On a cold evening he set a black cloth outside to pre-chill it.
- He caught fresh snow on the cloth and moved each flake individually to a lacquerware tray with tweezers.
- He observed under the microscope without exhaling toward his specimens, so his own breath wouldn’t dissolve them.
- He began the work as a teenager and kept at it for twenty years.
The technical scaffolding came from rangaku — “Dutch learning,” Western science absorbed through the Netherlands’ trading post on Dejima, the artificial island off Nagasaki where foreign merchants were confined for most of the Edo period. Doi worked with the rangaku scholar Takami Senseki, and it was through that same channel that Martinet’s Katechismus der natur reached Japanese scientists.
The collection’s afterlife is its own small history of how images travel. Doi’s snowflower patterns migrated onto textiles, teacups, hairpins, and other ornamented objects — helped along by their inclusion in Hokuetsu Seppu (1840), a bestselling work of human geography on Japan’s snow country. A expanded edition, Zoku Sekka Zusetsu, followed in 1840. Today the motifs are still embedded in Koga’s sidewalks and public art, which is a reasonable monument for a man history remembers as the Snow Lord.