When the first European and North American photographers came to Japan they found that foreign visitors wanted to take home images of traditional Japan. These Yokohama shashin were the most produced form of photography in Japan the late 19th century. They were often hand-coloured by ukiyo-e artisans and artists trained in western-style painting, and bound into lacquerware albums. As the number of Japanese photographers increased, they also contributed to this popular market. At the same time foreigners travelling in Japan would write about the country as a kind of Fairyland or Wonderland. The combination of this literary and visual narrative has been extremely powerful in defining Japan's identity abroad, but also within the country itself. At one level, creating a narrative of a Fairyland is a retreat from reality, but it's not a one-way street; nostalgic longing for a mythical past, or hopes for a utopian future shape our reality. At best these desires create communities with purpose, at worst they replace history with make-believe or cause conflict, when the dreams of one group do not conform to another's. This photographic project has taken as its starting point the Fairyland of Yokohama shashin, copying some of the original compositions of the late 1800s, and goes forward through the false utopia of Manchukuo to examine the Fairylands of leisure and consumption that we find in present-day Japan.