Watch Vintage Footage of Tokyo, Circa 1910, Get Brought to Life with Artificial Intelligence [Video]

For more than 200 years, the rulers of Japan kept the coun­try all but closed to the out­side world. In 1854, the “Black Ships” of Amer­i­can com­man­der Matthew Per­ry arrived to demand an end to Japan­ese iso­la­tion — and a com­mence­ment of Japan­ese world trade. With­in decades, many fash­ion-for­ward Euro­peans and even Amer­i­cans could­n’t get enough things Japan­ese, espe­cial­ly the art, crafts, and cloth­ing that exem­pli­fied kinds of beau­ty they’d nev­er known before. (Vin­cent van Gogh was a par­tic­u­lar­ly avid fan.) But if Japan changed the West, the West trans­formed Japan, a process ful­ly in effect in the footage above, shot on the streets of Tokyo between 1913 and 1915.

These scenes may look famil­iar to ded­i­cat­ed Open Cul­ture read­ers, and indeed, we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured anoth­er ver­sion of this film back in 2018. With its speed cor­rect­ed to remove the herky-jerk­i­ness com­mon to old films and with back­ground noise added, these …