Mr. Morihiro Oki was born in Kyoto in 1929. He distinguished himself as a photographer when he was an undergraduate student at Kindai University, and worked actively as a photojournalist from the 1950s to the 1970s. He visited India for the first time in the early 1970s taking an interest in Indian population problems, when he became acquainted with Mother Teresa in 1974. His name became known both at home and abroad as a photographer of Mother Teresa from that time on. While making photographic records of her activities in Calcutta (now Kolkata) from 1974 to 1979, he started traveling around India and became interested in its wide and rich variety of festivals, crafts, and folk music and performances. He visited all over India and Nepal more than 70 times in 20 years to take photographs of mainly its folk culture and people’s lives. Some of them have already been exhibited and published. Kikan Minzokugaku (Quarterly Journal of Ethnography), the bulletin of the association club of the National Museum of Ethnography, has also featured his photographs of India several times. Mr. Oki, who has been vigorously active in broad field as a photographer for long time, passed away in April, 2018, being missed by many people.
 In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology acquired all of his precious photographs of India and Nepal (except for the photographs of Mother Teresa) based on his request to preserve their original positive films and to digitalize them. This database shows the entire data (about 20,000 items), having been analyzed and categorized by the scholars on South Asia of the National Museum of Ethnology and their collaborators based on interviews with Mr. Oki. Part of this project was funded by the NIHU project of Contemporary India Area Studies.
 We tried our best to make the data on the place, time, and objects of each photograph clear, but some of such information still remains uncertain. If you have any supplementary dates, information for data correction, or other suggestions for this database, please inform us of them using this digital information sheet. We would like to develop the data with viewers’ collaboration.
 Mr. Oki did not necessarily record the exact date of all his photographs. But we could still conjecture the timing of some photographs based on the record of month and year typed on the mounts of his positive slide films, whose production he had ordered immediately after his photographic data collection. “Timing of photographs” of this database means the month and year typed on such mounts of slides. It does not necessarily mean the exact timing at which each photograph was taken. When the data on the “timing of photographs” are not given in this database, it means that we could not even get that information because the mounts of slide films were reproduced for some reason (usually, newly reproduced mounts do not have the timing record typed).
 When Mr. Oki was actively taking photographs in India, especially through the 1970s to 1980s, few Japanese scholars and tourists could visit South Asia. Some of the places he visited are still quite difficult for ordinary tourists to visit. His photographs also include precious performing arts, crafts, and buildings that are impossible to see today. Through making this photograph database public, we would like to contribute to the promotion of understanding of the society and culture of India and Nepal, and to return the fruits of a Japanese professional photographer’s endeavors to their own original places and people.