September 4, 1900 · Nippon Yusen Kaisha · Dinner
NYK first-class service combined western dining conventions with Japanese visual identity. Menus were typically printed in English with French dish names, but the covers drew on traditional Japanese print arts — ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) wood-block compositions were standard cover treatments through the 1900s.
The cover features stylised figures of Japanese children in traditional dress, executed in the flat-colour woodblock idiom that had recently influenced European Art Nouveau. The hand-written daily menu is affixed to the front as a separate paper slip — a common NYK convention that gave each crossing’s menu a customised feel within a standardised cover.
Nippon Yusen Kaisha — “Japan Mail Steamship Company” — was founded in 1885 by the Mitsubishi zaibatsu in alignment with the Meiji government’s strategic goal of establishing Japanese-flagged international shipping. By 1900 NYK was running Yokohama–San Francisco and Yokohama–Seattle services as well as connections to Hong Kong, Singapore, Bombay, and London.
Visual style: Ukiyo-e style colour woodblock illustration with affixed handwritten menu slip.
What you receive
- Three print sizes: 8×10, 11×14, 16×20 inches (300 DPI, ready for any home printer or framing shop).
- Two versions of each size: a pure print (no added text) and a museum print (with a small caption: restaurant or ship, year, and source).
- A 1–2 page PDF with the menu’s historical context.
- One ZIP file, instantly downloadable after checkout.
About the source
This menu is preserved in the Buttolph Collection of Menus at The New York Public Library and is in the public domain in the United States. The Menu Press has curated, digitally restored, and reformatted the work for modern printing.
