In 1609 representatives of the Verenigde Oost- Indische Compagnie received permission from Tokugawa Ieyasu to establish a trade factory on the island of Hirado. By order of the Japanese government, the factory was moved to the man-made island of Deshima in the bay of Nagasaki in 1641. There the Company employees spent their days in seclusion, strictly controlled by the Japanese authorities, and life revolved around the annual arrival and departure of the Dutch ships. After the dissolution of the VOC at the end of the eighteenth century, trade with Japan continued to be managed by the Dutch Colonial Government in Batavia until the factory was shut down in 1860. In the years that followed, the small island was swallowed up by the land reclamation projects of Nagasaki, but over the past twenty years the city government has been engaged in reconstruction works, gradually restoring the lay-out and the buildings of the former trading post to their original appearance.
Whereas daimyō, feudal lords, ruled in the larger part of Japan, the city of Nagasaki came directly under the Bakufu, the central administration of the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo. Two governors, the Nagasaki bugyō, who resided alternately in Nagasaki and the capital, were in charge of administering Nagasaki and the foreign communities of the Dutch and the Chinese. The governors were assisted by various officers called bongioisen or banjozen by the Dutch. The city itself was governed by a council of civic aldermen, machidoshiyori, in Dutch stadsburgemeesters. The city of Nagasaki was divided into wards, machi, each controlled by an otona, in Dutch wijkmeester.
Deshima also constituted a separate ward and was likewise controlled by an otona. He was responsible for the Dutch residents, supervised the maintenance of the buildings on Deshima, administered the Japanese entering or working on Deshima, and kept order during the trading season.1 The otona was assisted by officers called caserossen by the Dutch. They deputized for him and supervised the warehouses on Deshima.
Other Japanese people with whom the Dutch interacted on a regular basis were the compradoors, suppliers of provisions and other necessities, and the cooks who cooked their meals. Craftsmen such as carpenters, who had to repair the buildings on Deshima and the sampans (vessels used to load and unload the VOC ships), and labourers such as coolies, who were employed to weigh and carry the merchandise that was brought ashore from the ships at the roadstead or taken aboard for shipping overseas, were also permitted to set foot on the island. During the trading season, merchants were permitted past the land gate separating Deshima from Nagasaki to take part in negotiations or auctions. Female nocturnal companions from Maruyama, the pleasure quarter in Nagasaki, were the only Japanese permitted to spend the night there apart from the guardsmen and the interpreters on duty.2
All contacts between the Dutch Company servants and Japanese officials were mediated by a corps of Japanese interpreters, tolken in Dutch, of varying degrees of ability. In the first half of the seventeenth century they still used Portuguese but later they switched to Dutch. The senior interpreters provided translations of all official documents that were exchanged and signed and stamped them. The interpreters combined various jobs as linguists, commercial agents, and spies. As the years went by they also distinguished themselves as translators of Dutch books into Japanese.
The number of Dutch personnel on the island varied over the years depending on the volume of trade. When trade gradually declined during the eighteenth century hindered by the policies of the shogunate, so did the number of men staffing the factory. The complement consisted of the opperhoofd (the chief with the rank of senior merchant), a couple of merchants, bookkeepers, clerks or assistants, a surgeon, sometimes a junior one as well, a dispenser or steward, and one or two men to do odd jobs. They brought their own servants (slaves from the Indonesian Archipelago and the Indian Subcontinent) to attend to them in their living quarters. The latter might also have sometimes been able to provide musical entertainment.
Pursuant to a shogunal order issued in 1641, an opperhoofd of Deshima should be replaced after a one-year term of office, but he was allowed a number of appointments with an interval of at least one year between two successive ones. Almost half the number of opperhoofden who served on Deshima in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries availed themselves of this opportunity and served more than one term of office; for instance in the period covered in this volume, Jan van Elseracq, Pieter Anthonijsz Overtwater, Frederik Coyett, Johannes Boucheljon and Zacharias Wagenaer did so. In 1794 the rule was relaxed and the opperhoofd was permitted to stay for five years in a row.
Life and trade in the factory depended on the monsoon winds and the strict regulations imposed by the Japanese government in 1641. The ships from Batavia arrived in Nagasaki on the southwest monsoon around July and August, one of them bringing the incoming opperhoofd. The hectic trading season would then last until the 20th day of the 9th month of the lunar calendar, the ultimate day of departure from Nagasaki of the VOC ships fixed by the shogunal government. This date usually fell in the months of October or November, when the northeast monsoon had begun to blow. The accounts were closed, often barely in time, and the departing opperhoofd handed the charge of the factory over to his successor.
The period in between trading seasons was called the stille tijd, quiet time. It was during this time – when the Company servants were left with little to do – that the opperhoofd and his party undertook the hofreis (the court journey or Edo sanpu) to the shogunal court in Edo to pay homage to the shogun and offer him gifts on behalf of the VOC. This expression of gratitude for permission to trade in Japan was expected from the Company every year. After the Dutch party had witnessed several conflagrations in Edo in the late 1650s, the Bakufu gave orders that they should arrive in Edo in spring, when the risk of fires would be lower. The whole journey up and back – carried in palanquins, on foot and on horseback over land and in Japanese barges across the Inland Sea – took three to four months on average and was quite a strenuous and costly undertaking. The servants of the VOC were the only western observers who travelled through Japan on an annual basis. Depending on the interest and powers of observation of an opperhoofd, the contents of the diaries of these court journeys can be quite informative about Japanese society.
The Archive of the Dutch Factory in Japan
The factory on Deshima had always kept its own archive, which also included records dating to the period the factory was in Hirado, for reference. Having an archive to consult on decisions taken in the past was especially important in Japan, where precedence was the guiding principle. We come across references in the dagregisters stating that older records had been consulted to decide on a course of action, even at the request of the Nagasaki bugyō. In 1852, the Governor-General in Batavia issued an order that the records in the Japan archive that could be missed be transferred to Batavia. The documents prior to 1800 were subsequently shipped away to the General Secretariat in Batavia with the exception of the documents written in Japanese, such as the safe conduct issued by Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Japanese documents were sent to Batavia in September 1860 together with the records dating to the period 1800–1842. In 1862 and 1863 parts of the Japan archive were sent to the Netherlands, the last part arriving there in 1909.
At the Nationaal Archief in The Hague the Japan archive is kept separately from the VOC archive. It covers a shelf length of almost forty metres. It includes many types of documents: resolutions, correspondence, memoranda, bookkeeping journals and ledgers, invoices, reports, accounts, orders, notarial deeds, muster-rolls, and of course dagregisters, the official diaries kept by the opperhoofden. An inventory of the records was published in 1964 by M.P.H. Roessingh, senior archivist, and is available online.3 Records pertaining to the Dutch factories in Japan can also be found in the VOC archive, often as duplicates.4 The data published in the present publication have all been culled from these two archival collections.
In 1621 the Gentlemen Seventeen, the board of the VOC in the Dutch Republic, instructed the Governor- General and Councillors of the Indies in Batavia that they and their employees in all other trading settlements should keep “a daily journal of everything that occurs over there and that concerns us, both in our relations with the English and other peoples, whomsoever they may be, in whatever manner.”5 The only VOC establishments of which fairly complete sets of dagregisters have been preserved are Batavia Castle, Zeelandia Castle in Formosa, and the factory in Japan.
The dagregisters of the Japan factory commence in 1633. Those of Hirado (1633–1640) have been fully translated into Japanese by Nagazumi Yōko.6 The staff of the Historiographical Institute (Shiryō Hensanjo) of Tokyo University has edited the original Dutch texts and has translated the Hirado diaries (1633–1640) and the Deshima diaries, so far up to 1653, into Japanese.7 At an earlier date Murakami Naojirō had already published a Japanese translation of selections from the Deshima dagregisters of the 1641–1654 period.8
The present publication of the English translation of the Deshima Dagregisters 1641–1660 is an improved compilation of the two volumes of 1641–1650 and 1650–1660 previously published by the Institute for the History of European Expansion of Leiden University.9 The text covers more or less the full text of the manuscripts of these years but it is not a verbatim translation of the originals. The purpose of this publication is to provide anyone interested in this field of study with a sound idea of the contents of the original dagregisters, which can be consulted at the Nationaal Archief in The Hague. Scans of the originals are now also available online via the website of the Nationaal Archief.
For a succinct explanation of the history of the Deshima Dagregisters Project, which has been funded from the beginning to the end by the Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation and the Reael Stichting, we refer to the Editorial Note in this volume.
See Matsui, Yōko, ‘The Factory and the People of Nagasaki. Otona, Tolk, Compradoor’, Itinerario, 37/3 (2013), pp. 139–152.
See Viallé, Cynthia, ‘Daily Life of the Dutch in Canton and Nagasaki: A Comparison Based on the VOC Dagregisters and Other Sources’, Itinerario, 37/3 (2013), pp. 153–171.
Roessingh, M.P.H., Het archief van de Nederlandse factorij in Japan, The Archive of the Dutch Factory in Japan 1609–1860 (’s-Gravenhage, 1964); inventory access number 1.04.21. The information on the transfer of the archive was taken from Roessingh’s introduction to the inventory.
Meilink-Roelofsz, M.A.P., Raben, R., and Spijkerman, H. (eds), De archieven van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, The Archives of the Dutch East India Company (1602–1795) (’s-Gravenhage: Sdu Uitgeverij Koninginnegracht, 1992); inventory access number 1.04.02.
Chijs, J.A. van der (ed.), Dagh-Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India, anno 1640/1641 (´s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1887), iv.
Nagazumi, Yōko (transl.), Hirado Oranda shōkan no nikki [Diaries of the Dutch factory in Hirado], 4 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1969–1970).
Tōkyō Daigaku Shiryō Hensanjo (ed. and transl.), Nihon kankei kaigai shiryō: Oranda shōkanchō nikki [Historical documents in foreign languages relating to Japan: Diaries kept by the heads of the Dutch factory in Japan], 1633–1653 (Tokyo: Tokyo University Publishers, 1974–2021), transcriptions 13 vols; translations 12 vols, the translation of 1653 yet to be published.
Murakami, Naojirō (transl.), Nagasaki Oranda shōkan no nikki [Diaries of the Dutch factory in Nagasaki], 1641–1654, 3 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1956–1958).
Viallé, Cynthia, and Blussé, Leonard (eds), The Deshima Dagregisters, Vol. XI (1641–1650) and Vol. XII (1650–1660) Intercontinenta 23 and 25 (Leiden: Institute for the History of European Expansion, 2001–2005).