The University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) has a collection of approximately 1,500 magic lantern slides in its Japan Collection, which it has digitized with the permission of the Japan Foundation. The magic lantern was the precursor to the modern slide projector, and was extremely popular in Europe and Asia in the 1800s, with people going from towns to villages doing public shows. The slides featured on the UHM website are those that were produced and distributed by KBS, a group that was the predecessor of the Japan Foundation. To view the collection, you can browse alphabetically by title, category (from alcohol to fan making to Western clothes), and by slides with recent comments made about them. Visitors to the website shouldn't leave the site without browsing under the "University" category. With few exceptions, all the buildings are Western in style, and reminiscent of many U.S. colleges with their columns, stone, and tendency to sprawl.