Editorial Note
The publication of the first two decades of the Dagregisters of the Deshima factory by Brill Publishers has a long previous history which goes back to the 1980s. It is actually both a sequence and a further development of the first publication of the so-called Marginalia or original tables of contents of the Deshima Dagregisters covering the 1680–1800 period. In 1980 Leonard Blussé received an invitation from the Historiographical Institute (Shiryō Hensanjo) of Tokyo University to spend the autumn term in Tokyo to assist Dr Torii Yumiko, Prof. Kanai Madoka and Prof. Katō Eiichi in transcribing Dutch texts for the source publication of the Dagregisters (Diaries) of the VOC factory at Hirado. Four years earlier, in 1976, staff members of the Shiryō Hensanjo had begun the annotated publication of the Dutch Hirado factory diaries both in Dutch and in a Japanese translation. They have continued to do so until the present day in a very meticulous manner, proceeding with the diaries of the Deshima factory after completion of those of the Hirado factory. In fact, over the past 45 years the period 1633–1653 has been covered, which means that at this pace it will take a few centuries to complete this important source publication.
Back in the Netherlands, my concern about the slow pace of the source publication project became a topic of conversation during the “Loempia lunch” that used to be held at a Chinese restaurant around the corner from the former Blijenburg Building of the Algemeen Rijksarchief (General State Archives, now Nationaal Archief) in The Hague every Wednesday. This now long defunct lunch meeting for Dutch and foreign historians working on topics in overseas history was presided over by two formidable senior archivists with great knowledge of the history of Dutch-Japanese relations: Margot van Opstall and Marius Roessingh. While discussing improved and easier access to the Dutch archival sources on Japan, the question of how the employees of the Dutch East India Company serving in its factory on Deshima might have consulted the diaries of their predecessors came up. We reached the conclusion that they used the marginal notes or marginalia of each paragraph of the diaries as a primitive search engine to scan the main contents of the texts. These marginal notes, brief and concise in nature, summarize the contents of each paragraph and thus provide the cursory reader with the most important information.
Agreeing that research into the Deshima factory archive would be considerably facilitated if these marginalia were translated into English, we decided to proceed and publish them, supplemented by personal name and subject indexes to the full text of the diaries. In this way this research aid could then be used by researchers intending to consult the original manuscripts in the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague or in the shadow archive of all VOC documents on Japan kept by the Historiographical Institute of Tokyo University.
Marginalia were consistently added to the paragraphs of the Deshima diaries only from the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the year 1680 was selected as the beginning of a pilot project. Thanks to a grant from the Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation, the project was commenced by Ton Vermeulen under the joint supervision of Van Opstall, Roessingh and Blussé. Sadly though, when the first volume covering the 1680–1690 period appeared at the end of 1986 in the Intercontinenta Working Papers Series of the Centre for the History of European Expansion and the Reactions to it of Leiden University, Van Opstall and Roessingh had passed away.
The response to the appearance of this research tool was overwhelming: not only was the first printing sold out within a few months, but we also received many useful comments from readers abroad. When Paul van der Velde took over the task from Vermeulen in 1988, some of these suggestions were immediately incorporated: clear dates were placed in the margin, functions of personnel were replaced by the names of the people who held these functions and the composition of the indexes was altered. More importantly, obscure entries in the marginalia such as ‘reasons why’, ‘thoughts about the subject’ and ‘what happened during the meeting’ were replaced by the actual reasons, the concrete thoughts about the subject, and what in fact did happen during the meeting. In addition, descriptions were added to those parts of the text for which no marginalia existed. Paradoxically, in this expanded form the research tool became something of a source in its own right.
One major defect however remained. All Japanese personal names and topographical names were still written in their original Dutch spelling. At that point Willem Remmelink, the director of the Japan-Netherlands Institute (JNI) in Tokyo, stepped in as co-editor, making good on an earlier promise to help revise the index of Japanese names and topographical names. Rudolf Bachofner, at the time working at the JNI, took charge of identifying the Japanese names. The Leiden volumes of the years 1700–1740, which were sold out, underwent critical revisions. Thanks to additional grants from the Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation and The Bridgestone Foundation, the Japan-Netherlands Institute was able to publish The Deshima Diaries Marginalia 1700–1740, with kanji added to the Japanese names.1
In 1993 another change of personnel occurred. Cynthia Vialle replaced Paul van der Velde as prime editor in Leiden and Isabel van Daalen succeeded Rudolf Bachofner in Tokyo. At the instigation of Ms Vialle, other radical changes were made to the text and henceforth, although still published under the title The Deshima Dagregisters: their original tables of contents, the original marginal notes were replaced by comprehensive abstracts of the original diaries, including even more detailed indexes to the texts. In 2004, the four Leiden volumes covering the 1740–1800 period were once more critically revised and published in Tokyo by the Japan-Netherlands Institute, appearing as Volume Two of the Deshima Diaries Series.2 After the closure of the Japan-Netherlands Institute in 2012, the remaining sets of the Deshima Diaries covering the 1700–1800 period were saved and are still available from Brill Publishers as long as stocks last.
The present publication covering the 1641–1660 period is again a critically revised edition by Cynthia Vialle, Isabel van Daalen and Leonard Blussé of two earlier preliminary Intercontinenta editions. Although the funding of the Deshima Dagregisters Project came to an end in 2010, we still hope to publish with Brill Publishers a fourth volume covering the 1660–1680 period in the near future. Whether the critical twenty years covering the years 1680–1700 can be completely re-edited remains uncertain.
Leonard Blussé and Willem Remmelink
Velde, Paul van der, and Bachofner, Rudolf (eds), The Deshima Diaries Marginalia 1700–1740 (Tokyo: The Japan-Netherlands Institute, 1992).
Blussé, Leonard, Viallé, Cynthia, Remmelink, Willem, and Daalen, Isabel van (eds), The Deshima Diaries Marginalia 1740–1800 (Tokyo: The Japan-Netherlands Institute, 2004).