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In the period preceding Japan's growth into a self-sufficient industrialized powerhouse, their emergent railways imported a plethora of locomotives from Britain, America, Germany, Switzerland, and a very few from Belgium in their early days. The variety and antiquity of these engines would've made Japan a paradise for rail fans had these generally survived longer into the period when travel and color photography became more accessible. I especially like these 'Okajoki', (陸蒸気) as they are colloquially called today, for their English-type buffers and screw couplings applied to them, particularly on British and American locomotives built for Japanese rails. Baldwin locomotives, like this Sanyo Railway Class 10 (950) 2-4-2T, were really quite handsome for, as I like to call it, their 'Anglicized-American' look to them for their buffers, lack of a bell and cowcatcher, and marker-type lamps placed on them instead of a huge headlight. Note the similarities to Lyn, another Baldwin locomotive built for an English narrow gauge railway. Which non-Japanese built steam locomotives do you like? https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/locomotive/images/e/e5/BLW41_Sanyo_10.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20230426025240 https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BaldwinLocomotiveLyn.jpg

Here's an interesting link: http://gizmodo.com/13-gorgeous-travel-posters-from-1930s-japan-1533432495 Several of these have various 'tetsudou kyoku' names at the bottom. I don't know what the exact organizational structure was, but these were some kind of divisions or branch offices of Japanese Government Railways, predecessor of JNR. All horizontal writing is right-to-left. The second poster is sponsored by Governor-General of Korea Railways (not part of JGR, apparently) and the Sendai poster near the bottom shows a lot of older kanji.