A Place Is a Spectacle: A Description of the Arrival of a Dutch Trading Vessel in Edo-Period Nagasaki

by Harrison Schley, University of Pennsylvania

During Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868), trade with Europe was restricted to a single Dutch trading post on the island of Deijima, Nagasaki, with two Dutch ships permitted to arrive each year. To gain an understanding of how eighteenth-century Japanese viewed the Dutch traders and their yearly arrivals, I translated and analyzed a passage from the 1799 Nihon sankai meisan zue, or Famous Products of Japan’s Mountains and Seas, Illustrated. This work was part of a genre of travel literature and guidebooks that described famous sites and products throughout Japan, which could be now be visited more easily due to increased urbanization, trade and improved roadways.

The majority of the Nihon sankai meisan zue describes the manufacture of famous goods throughout the Japanese archipelago. However, the section on the Dutch ships at Nagasaki focuses almost exclusively on the pageantry associated with the arrival of the Dutch, including ceremonial cannon fire, flag raising, and music, rather than specific trade goods themselves. Additionally, while most of the visual references in the work show the manufacture of products, the two illustrations that accompany the Dutch ship passage represent the arrival of the ship itself.

To the author of the Nihon sankai meisan zue, and, presumably his Japanese readership, it was the Dutch traders themselves, rather than the goods they brought, that commanded fascination. A comparison with contemporary Dutch sources that describe the annual arrival of the ships in Nagasaki harbor both corroborates the account in the Nihon sankai meisan zue, and show that the Dutch were active participants in the pageantry surrounding the event.