A dagregister covers the term of office of the incumbent opperhoofd, the head of the factory. By shogunal order, from 1641 onwards, the opperhoofden had to be replaced every year. A dagregister usually starts in October or November of a particular year, when the incoming opperhoofd assumed the charge of the factory from his predecessor. The dates were dependent on the shogunal order dictating that the VOC ships had to sail from Japan by the 20th day of the 9th lunar month, around which time one dagregister ends and the next begins. In the text of this volume, an opperhoofd’s term of office is given in the header as [full name] 16##–16## (for instance, Zacharias Wagenaer 1656–1657).
In order to simplify the indexes, we refer to the year which covers the greater part of the dagregister; in the instance of Wagenaer’s dagregister of 1656–1657, that would be 1657. References in the indexes are to year (in bold) and the page number of the original manuscript, for instance 1657: 68. However, in many years covered in this volume, the manuscripts do not have page numbers; these have been inserted in our text. The page numbers are printed in small size in the margins of the columns of the text. The numbers in bold in the text are the days of the month.
For Japanese names we have used the Hepburn transliteration system; the Dutch spelling in the original manuscripts is given between < >. All Dutch spelling variations of a name are given.
Western names are generally listed as they are found in the manuscripts. In cases where someone’s personal preference is known from his autograph, we have used his preferred style. Seventeenth-century Dutch carried on the practice of the previous century of rendering a long i – ii – as y (the stroke of the second i lengthened, both without dots) or ij (the stroke of the second i lengthened, both with dots). They were interchangeable and there is no consistency of form. In all indexes, names with either y or ij have been listed after i (and not after x, as y represents ii and is not an upsilon).
In a few cases of well-known foreigners, such as the Portuguese ambassadors and priests, we have used the appropriate spelling.
In those cases that someone is not mentioned by his or her personal name in the text or is mentioned in a note, his or her name is placed between « ».