Hello, tidal wave of guests from Mr Den Beste's site. You caught me at a boring time, sorry. Perhaps this gallery of old pictures of bicycles in Japan, courtesy of the Japanese Bicycle History Research Club, will interest you. Should you thirst for more knowledge, I can also recommend their detailed history on the topic.

I got an Iwanami Bunko collection of drawings and cartoons by Charles "Japan Punch" Wirgman for 105 yen at Book Off, and let me tell you, that was a good investment. If nothing else, it was worth 105 yen to see this marvellously bad translation of a certain Shakespeare speech, here transcribed as best as I can understand the words written beneath his sketch of the soliliquatulating actor.

Arimas, arimasen, are wa nan deska:--
Moshi motto daijobu atama naka, itai arimas
Nawa mono to ha ichiban warui takusan ichiban;
Arui ude torimasu muko mendo koto umi
Soshte, bobbery [??] itashimas o shimai? Shindanji, neru
Mada; sorekara, nerve de hanashi mo yoroshi
Kokori itai to issen mainichi bonkotz
Ushi ototsan arimas. Sore wa dekimashta mono
Takusan shimashta, shindanji;-- neru; --
Neru! Okata nise haikin, sayo achira skoshi serampan;
Kara ano shindanji no neru, nani nise haikin dekimas
Kono nangai shindanji mono piggy [??] shimashita,
Skoshi mate sinjo:

It seems that this might be the earliest (surviving) translation of Shakespeare into Japanese, although obviously it wasn't done by a person who had any great facility with the language. ("It's there, it's not, what is that?" would not be a bad back-translation of the first line.)

At this site here I found a list of a few others, from the extremely wordy 1880s version "ながらふべきか但し又、ながらふべきに非ざるか、ここが思案のしどころぞ" to the punchy just-before-1900 "生か、死か、それが疑問だ".

Could nise haikin ("dream") really be 偽拝見? I have no idea why shindanji means "death", though.