Acknowledgements
Many people and institutions have contributed in some way to the publication of this volume. First and foremost, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the Board of the Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation for their magnanimous funding throughout the whole running of the project. Without their support, the publication of the multiple volumes of the Deshima Dagregisters could never have been carried out.
We thank the staff of the Nationaal Archief at The Hague, where the archive of the Dutch factory in Japan is preserved, for allowing us access to the original documents. The help of Professors Matsui Yōko and Matsukata Fuyuko, kind hosts of Isabel van Daalen at the Historiographical Institute of Tokyo University, in retracing the correct Japanese nomenclature behind the names mentioned in seventeenth-century Dutch sources, is greatly appreciated. We thank the staff of the now defunct Japan-Netherlands Institute, Dr Willem Remmelink, Ms Yanagisawa Kaoru, and Ms Miyazaki Yumi for their support. Thanks to timely intervention by the staff of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Tokyo, the remaining stock of the preceding volumes of the Deshima Diaries was saved when the Japan-Netherlands Institute was closed. The History Department of Leiden University has generously provided this project with all necessary facilities over the years. We are particularly grateful to Rosemary Robson-McKillop for polishing the English texts. Mrs Robson has supported us as English language editor almost from the beginning of the Deshima Dagregisters Project in the 1980s. It is our wish that she will accept the role again when we prepare publication of the next volume. We appreciate the valuable comments and suggestions we have received from various subscribers and users of the volumes in the Intercontinenta Series, on which the present edition is based.
We acknowledge permission from the following institutions for publication of images from their holdings: Nationaal Archief, The Hague; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Stadsarchief Amsterdam Beeldbank; Universiteitsbibliotheek, Leiden; Museum for History and Culture, Nagasaki; Shiryō Hensanjo (Historiographical Institute) of the University of Tokyo; Edo-Tokyo Museum, Tokyo; Morioka City Community Hall / Morioka History and Culture Museum; International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto.
Finally, we express our indebtedness to the fourteen opperhoofden who lived on Deshima in the years between 1641 and 1660 and whose dagregisters are published in this volume. The comments they noted down, almost every single day, on life and trade on their small island, their travels through Japan on their way to and from the court and during their stay in Edo, on events elsewhere, inside and outside Japan, shed considerable light on an axial period in Japanese history: the completion of so-called Sakoku between 1641 and 1660.
Cynthia Vialle, Isabel van Daalen and Leonard Blussé