Abstract
Prologue in southern Japan, but from 1571 Nagasaki became their port of destination.1Some forty years later, in 1609, the Dutch received red seal permits (shuinjō, 朱印状) from Tokugawa Ieyasu and set up a trade factory on the island of Hirado.Japanese vessels provided with these warrants from the shogunate -the so-called shuinsen (red seal ships 朱印船) -sailed to various destinations in Southeast Asia where they could meet Chinese traders, neatly evading the maritime prohibitions imposed by the Chinese court.This situation changed completely between 1633 and 1636 when the shogunal government issued its own maritime prohibitions (kaikin, 海禁) forbidding all Japanese overseas shipping, and finally expelled the Portuguese in 1639.Henceforth, the Dutch merchants of the VOC were the only Europeans allowed to trade in Japan.They kept this exceptional position until 1853, when Commodore Perry demanded the opening up of Japan's ports to international trade.How the successive changes in regime and subsequent state formation processes took place in the Far East has been studied in detail using local and European sources.Japanese historians in particular have discovered the value of the copious record keeping by Dutch East India Company merchants stationed in Japan and Formosa (1624-1662), because the latter were in a privileged position to observe and experience what was going on in the East Asian arena.The 1641-1660 period covered by the present volume can be considered an axial period for the Dutch position in East Asia: in Japan the VOC factory was moved from Hirado to Nagasaki.Yet, by the end of the same period the Dutch colony in the island of Formosa had become so entangled in the ongoing civil war in China that it was finally lost to the Chinese Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong (1624-1662), named Coxinga by the Dutch, in 1662.Consequently, the record keeping by the men-on-the-spot in the Deshima factory in 1 Boxer, C.R.,