Netherlands India and Japan

THE DUTCH and the Japanese have had long if not always the most honorable relations with each other. The Dutch arrived in Japan some sixty years after the Spanish and the Portuguese, but from then until the present they have maintained continuous relations with that country. The Japanese came to the East Indies at about the same time that the Dutch arrived there. The East India Company used the Japanese in various employments, but chiefly as soldiers. If Japan had not gone into seclusion the Japanese colony in the East Indies might have become important, but cut off from fresh accessions the Japanese group became absorbed in the general population. Throughout more than two centuries of Japanese seclusion, Japan allowed the Dutch alone of all the Western peoples to continue diplomatic and trade relations, though in a restricted form. The Dutch post on the island of Deshima in the harbor of Nagasaki was in effect a combination of a diplomatic post and trading company agency. When the Dutch Government took over the East Indian Company at the end of the i8th Century it succeeded to the trade monopoly of the Company, which was apparently of no great value, as the amount of trade was not great.' During the few years of French control over the Netherlands in the Napoleonic period Deshima was the only place in the world where the Dutch flag continued to fly. While the post at Deshima was to the Dutch only a trading agency and an unusual sort of diplomatic post, it was to Japan an aperture through which it obtained a surprising amount of information and even learning from the outside world. From the Dutch on Deshima the Japanese learned a great deal about cartography

Geography · Political science · Asian Studies and History