A Glimpse behind the Screens

Some Remarks on the Significance of the Deshima Dagregisters for the Study of Tokugawa Japan.T he Dutch resident merchants who lived from 1641 until 1860 on the isle of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay cannot boast of much popularity among Western students of Japanese culture; indeed they are the frequent targets of scathing comments.The original criticism was directed at the obsequiousness of the Company officials.Knocking their heads and crawling over mats for the heathen ruler of Japan, the nefarious Dutchmen were said to trample on crosses on command.The Dutch of Deshima were, to borrow Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles' words, 'submitting to unmanly degradation at the caprice, and often for the amusement of the Japanese in order to gain their own ends.'One would almost tend to believe that the British empire builder organized a moral crusade of his own when he twice tried to take over 'this sink of the most disgraceful corruption and peculation' in 1813 and 1814. 1 After Japan opened its doors to Western entreprise in the 1850's, there was no longer any reason to envy the Dutch for their past trade monopoly, but from then on another reproach was increasingly made.It was recognized in academic circles that, since the middle of the eighteenth century, a cultural undertow had been set in motion among the Japanese literati, which contributed to the awakening of Tokugawa society to the needs of modernization.Rangaku (Dutch studies) without doubt had opened Japanese eyes to Western science and technology, but given the sudden Japanese craze for anything Western in the early Meiji period, cultural historians were puzzled about the relatively small scale of the Western Learning school during the closing years of the era of 'isolation.'They were quite perplexed about the absence of a concerted Dutch effort to encourage these studies.As a result the criticism now came to be focussed against the cultural apathy of the motley group of ten-odd Dutch merchants, doctors and scribes who had been spending their days in lethargy at Deshima during the past two hunderd years.The verdict by Donald Keene in his well known study The Japanese Discovery of Europe 1720-1830 has set the tone of the criticism by Japanologists of the Dutch East India Company servants: 'Not many more than half a dozen of those who visited Japan during the two hundred and fifty years of the factory's existence could be described as cultured men.Most of them were completely uninterested in Japan, and regarded it as a great imposition if they were required to attend a local festival or indeed to do anything that kept them away from their accounts.The pages of the factory journals kept by the successive directors form a dreary succession of business calculations, with seldom a word to suggest that the Dutch were living in what was one of the most fascinating countries in the world.,2If only every

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