The Oldest Japanese Picture Postcards in Today’s Slovenia

As a part of the research activities “East Asian Collections in Slovenia”, many old Japanese postcards have been identified in recent years. For the postcards archived in the National and University Library (NUK) in Ljubljana, no information was available in relation to their user or collector, when and from whom these postcards were acquired, etc. Out of 16 Japanese and Chinese postcards in the Library, seven have been actually used and sent with some messages from Japan or China to today’s Slovenia in the year 1899. During the research on other picture-postcards archived in today’s Slovenia, and in cooperation with specialists in Japanese Studies and the history of the modern era (end of the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries, the Meiji period in Japan) in the context of East Asian and Austro-Hungarian exchanges, it has gradually become clear who the user of the postcards was and in what setting. It was Jožef Obereigner, the second son of the caretaker of the Snežnik estate, who was an engineer and served in the Austro-Hungarian Navy.