The Fan Without Its Ribs: Dejima and the Three Acres That Held the West, 1634–1859

Eight Hundred Souls and a Bridge

What Was Dejima? The Portuguese Confined in Nagasaki Harbor in 1636

On 8 August 1636 four Portuguese galliots came into Nagasaki harbor under the Captain-Major Dom Gonçalo de Silveira, and the officials who rowed out to meet them did not begin with the cargo. They began with the rudders.

The rudders came off. So did the sails, unbent from the yards and carried ashore, and so did the powder and shot, all of it sealed into a government store under a shogunal chop, to be returned when the ships were cleared to leave and not a day before. Only then were the holds inspected. The crews and passengers, roughly eight hundred souls, were searched individually, walked over a single bridge, and put behind a wall.

The wall was new. So was the ground it stood on.

What the Portuguese were looking at, as they filed off the bridge at the Edo-machi end of the waterfront, was an island that had not existed thirty months earlier. Its name, Dejima, written 出島, meant the island that juts out, which early European writers rendered variously as "De Island" and, from someone who had heard the syllables without seeing the characters, "Former Island." It had been raised out of the bay floor on shogunal orders, at private expense, in the shape of an opened fan with the bamboo ribs removed, a form the sources insist was specified from above rather than chosen by an engineer.

Its dimensions are a small monument to the difficulty of measuring anything in the seventeenth century. Japanese municipal surveys give the area as 3,969 tsubo, and then, elsewhere in the same series, as 3,885 tsubo 6 bu 4 mō. In modern terms that is about 1.3 hectares, 3.2 acres, a plot a well-off suburban family might mow, though one nineteenth-century medical writer working from a source that said 3.2 printed thirty-two, which turned a prison yard into a park. The one figure the residents agreed on was that a man walking the path inside the wall covered exactly six hundred yards, which is a number you only establish by walking it often.

The Portuguese had three trading seasons on it.

Twenty-Five Men Who Were Volunteered

Building Dejima, 1634–1636: The Twenty-Five Merchants and the Rent

The shogunate did not pay for Dejima. This was not thrift; it was a settled principle of Tokugawa administration that a policy costing the treasury nothing could not be reversed by a shortfall in the treasury.

In 1634, the eleventh year of Kan'ei, though some accounts push the order to 1635, the bakufu instructed the wealthiest merchants of Nagasaki to finance a reclamation off the Edo-machi district. Twenty-five houses were named and entered the record collectively as the Dejima-chōnin, the Dejima townsmen; one Japanese chronicle counts twenty, the sort of discrepancy that arises when a consortium loses members between the subscription and the completion. In exchange they received the right to trade with the Portuguese who would be confined there, and the right to charge them rent for the privilege. They were ordered to build a hotel at their own cost, forbidden to choose its guests, and permitted to set the tariff.

The engineering was straightforward and enormous. Between 1634 and 1635 a hill near the waterfront was demolished and carted into the bay, on the order of fifty thousand cubic meters of earth and rock, and the fill faced with basalt embankments to keep the harbor from taking it back. By February 1635 the Dutch chief factor at Hirado, Nicolaes Couckebacker, was noting in his diary that stone walls were rising. The island was finished in May 1636, and the Portuguese, who until then had lodged where they liked in the town, were moved onto it.

What it cost is not known. No source in Portuguese, Dutch or Japanese preserves a construction total in silver, taels or ryō, which for a project of this visibility is a striking absence and a standing caution against anyone who quotes one. What survives instead is the rent. The Portuguese paid 5,500 taels of silver a year. When the Dutch inherited the tenancy the figure was confirmed on 25 October 1641 at 55 kanme of silver, distributed among the twenty-five landlords. One Japanese source gives it as 50 kanme, and adds that the Portuguese had been paying over eighty. The figures do not reconcile. What they agree on is the principle: the rent bore no relation to the freehold value of a mud-speck, and was set by men who knew their tenants had nowhere else on earth to go.

The Grammar of the Walls

Dejima's Layout: The Walls, the Single Bridge, the Water Gate and the Houses

Everything about the island's fabric was an argument about who could touch whom.

A stone wall ran the full circuit of the shoreline. Just inside it stood a palisade of deal boards, tall enough to block sightlines and topped along its whole length with a double row of sharpened iron pikes set outward. Out in the water beyond it a further stockade marked a boundary Japanese craft were forbidden to cross, so that the island was fenced twice, once against people getting off and once against people rowing up.

There was one way in. A single bridge crossed to the mainland at Edo-machi, plank-built at first and rebuilt in stone in 1678, with a guardhouse at its head and shogunal notice boards listing the prohibitions in force. No Dutchman crossed it without a written permit, and no Japanese except officials, inspectors, interpreters, courtesans and the labor gangs; in 1666 the boards were amended to bar, specifically, women other than yūjo, monks other than those of Mount Kōya, and beggars. On the seaward side stood the Suimon, a water gate opened only in the trading season, through which the cargo sampans worked.

Inside, the island was a village with two streets. The Main Street ran the length of the fan, 236 paces by Kaempfer's count, lined both sides with two-story wooden houses built to a single logic, warehouse below and living quarters above, so that a merchant slept on top of his stock. Between forty and forty-four buildings stood on the plot, of which as many as thirty were godowns. The largest was the Capitan-beya, the chief factor's residence, a hybrid that knew it: Japanese carpentry, shōji frames with the paper replaced by imported glass, and inside, chairs and heavy tables under woolen cloth and chests of drawers inlaid in mother-of-pearl with European sea battles.

On the east side was a garden: rare plants, fruit trees, a small pond and a summerhouse, adjoining the physician's quarters. Three of the most consequential European naturalists of the eighteenth century would dig in that soil in turn. It was about the size of a tennis court.

Eighty Tons of Silver

The Portuguese Silver Trade at Dejima and the Expulsion of 1639

The paradox of the Portuguese years is that the trade reached its all-time peak while the political relationship was being dismantled around it.

In October 1635 the Portuguese galleons sailed with 1,500 kan of silver ingots, most of it borrowed from Japanese creditors on respondência, the sea-loan by which Japanese money financed Portuguese voyages and carried their risk in exchange for a punishing rate of return. On 6 November 1637 six galliots left Nagasaki with 2,600 chests of silver bars aboard, roughly eighty tons of bullion in a single sailing. That was the summit of the entire Macau to Nagasaki trade, and it happened eleven months before the men who made it were marched past a row of severed heads.

The Shimabara Rebellion ended in April 1638 with the fall of Hara Castle, and because the rebels had fought under crosses and the war cry "Santiago," the shogunate concluded that Macau had supplied or at least encouraged them. Dejima was put under military blockade, and the Captain-Major of 1637 was arrested and held there as a hostage until the next year's fleet arrived. When that fleet came, the ninety Portuguese and two hundred and fifty Black crewmen aboard, as the record classifies them, were walked to Dejima past the displayed heads of Amakusa Shirō and his followers.

The trade collapsed with the politics. Only two galliots came in 1638, carrying out 1,259 chests of silver by the bottomry records or 1,600 by the municipal ones. In 1639 Vasco Palha de Almeida arrived with around 500,000 taels' worth of goods and was refused permission to unload any of it. On 20 May the Grand Inquisitor Inoue Chikugo-no-kami Masashige condemned the Portuguese captains on the island, and on 4 August the edict went out: all Portuguese vessels arriving in Japan were to be burned and all aboard executed.

On 17 October 1639 the last Portuguese ship stood out for Macau, and the island stood completely empty.

Macau, which owed between 500,000 and 700,000 taels in sea-loans to Japanese creditors, sent an embassy in 1640 with rich presents, seventy-four people and deliberately no merchandise, the absence of cargo being the argument. Sixty-one of them, including all four ambassadors, were beheaded at Nishizaka on 3 August, and thirteen survivors were put into a six-oared boat with a tablet stating that even the God of the Christians, should he come, would pay with his head. A last approach in 1647 was met by domain troops blockading the bay.

The island had cost twenty-five merchants a fortune, and it had been useless for a year.

The Date on the Gable

The Dutch Move to Dejima in 1641 and the Rules of Their Confinement

What saved the investment was a building at Hirado with the wrong inscription on it.

The Dutch East India Company had traded from Hirado since 1609, on a charter from Tokugawa Ieyasu its lawyers considered watertight, and by 1640 it had built there large stone warehouses that looked, to the bakufu inspectors who came to see them that autumn, considerably more like a fortress than a countinghouse. The inspectors also read the date carved into the gable. It said AD 1639. A Christian era date, cut in stone, on foreign-held ground, three years after Shimabara, in a country where the calendar itself had become a loyalty test.

On 9 November 1640 François Caron, the opperhoofd at Hirado, was ordered in audience by the daimyō to demolish the warehouses. He complied at once, without argument, and set his men to it with such visible enthusiasm that the shogunal commissioner went home satisfied. He learned afterward that armed samurai had been concealed in the palace with instructions to kill him at the first sign of hesitation. At the same audience it was decreed that the opperhoofd must be replaced every year.

Inoue Masashige, unable to break the Dutch claim under Ieyasu's charter by legal means, solved the problem geographically. The Nagasaki town elders, ruined by the loss of the Portuguese trade, petitioned to have the Dutch moved to their city, where the empty island was waiting and the rent already assessed. On 11 May 1641 the relocation was ordered, and by 22 May the Dutch were, in the phrase one of them used, cooped up on Dejima. On 13 August the magistrate dismissed almost all the servants they had brought from Hirado, permitting them two interpreters, one clerk, two cooks and three room servants. Every other Japanese who set foot on the island thereafter would be an employee of the Nagasaki authorities.

The terms were comprehensive. No Dutch wives, children or relatives, ever. No Christian service of any kind: on sighting the Japanese coast, Bibles, prayer books and any European coin stamped with a cross were locked in a barrel and sealed until departure. The Dutch were forbidden to learn Japanese, a rule that made the interpreters indispensable and therefore, in the fullness of time, dangerous.

They were never made to trample on the fumi-e. The image-trampling ceremony ran through Nagasaki every year just after the New Year, compulsory for every Japanese in the city including the factory's own servants. Europe believed for two centuries that the Dutch had submitted to it to keep their trade, a belief Jonathan Swift found well enough established to satirize in Gulliver's Travels. The authorities knew perfectly well that the Dutch were Christians. They had concluded that the Dutch did not proselytize, which was the only clause that mattered, and when the ceremony reached a room where a Dutchman happened to be, they asked him to step outside so as not to give offense.

The Arithmetic of a Prison

The Dutch Trade at Dejima: Profits, Silver, Copper and Shogunate Limits

The Company did not accept these terms out of resignation. It accepted them because Japan was, for decades, the most profitable posting in Asia.

Inbound came raw silk from China, Tonkin and Bengal, with woolens, hides, sugar, spices, lead, tin and quicksilver; outbound went silver, gold koban, copper, camphor, Arita porcelain, lacquerware and swords. In 1640, the zenith, imports were valued at 6,295,367 gulden against exports of 3,943,079. Then the Company was moved to Dejima, and in 1643 imports fell to 680,436 gulden and exports to 1,175,958, under a fifth of the 1640 figure.

The island cost the VOC four fifths of its Japan trade in three years, and the Company stayed anyway, because the margins on what remained were extraordinary. Import mark-ups ran from fifty to over a hundred percent. Between 1662 and 1700 the factory netted 25,416,376 gulden, near £54,000 a year, enough on its own to pay a ten percent annual dividend on the Company's entire subscribed capital of £540,000 before the return cargoes were sold at a further eighty to ninety percent.

The silver moved in quantities that unbalanced the Japanese economy. The Dutch shipped twelve million gulden of it in the twenty-seven years to 1668, at which point the shogunate banned silver export outright, and copper took its place. In 1675 nearly 120 tons of copper coin went out, drawn substantially from melting down Hideyoshi's Great Buddha at Kyoto, an image cast for the salvation of all beings and shipped to Batavia as bar stock.

Against this the shogunate built a regulatory ratchet, and it only ever turned one way. The itowappu, the silk allotment guild of 1604 known to Europeans as the pancada, gave merchants of five cities the exclusive right to name a single purchase price for the entire raw silk cargo before any individual sale could occur, removing pricing power from the seller by abolishing competition among the buyers. In 1672 the Nagasaki governor extended the same principle to every imported commodity: samples submitted, prices set by appraisers, take it or ship it home. In 1685 the appraisals were replaced by fixed annual ceilings of 300,000 taels of silver for the Dutch and 600,000 for the Chinese, with the taels converted into koban at 68 mace rather than the nominal 60, quietly reducing the Dutch allowance to 44,118 koban. In 1715 Arai Hakuseki's Shōtoku shinrei, drafted to protect what he called the bones of the country, cut the Dutch to two ships and 3,000 kanme of silver a year.

The trade was never abolished. It was priced down, over a century and a half, to the point where it no longer mattered to anyone but the men who lived on the island.

Two Hundred Watching Fifteen

Who Lived on Dejima? Dutch Staff, Enslaved Servants and Japanese Officials

The population of Dejima is a question the sources handle badly, and the way they handle it badly is informative.

The Dutch establishment was small and strictly ranked, and the ranking was visible at table, from the opperhoofd, known in Japanese as the Kapitan, down through the merchants, the storekeeper, the surgeons and the clerks to the carpenter, the blacksmith and the cooper. The totals given range from two to twenty-three, the commonest being ten to fifteen Dutchmen, falling to seven or eight in winter, though the chief factor François de Haese recorded in 1670 that twenty-one to twenty-three could be there at once. One modern scholar has asserted that the island was populated exclusively by Dutchmen and never by more than ten, which is wrong twice in one sentence.

It is wrong the second time because a substantial share of the residents were neither Dutch nor free. The Company and its employees brought servants and enslaved people from across its Asian network, recorded in Japanese as kurobō and in Dutch as Swartongos, ten to twenty at any time, and between 1781 and 1787 there were more Asian slaves on Dejima than European employees. Their owners renamed them September, Fortuin, Paris, Apollo, Lakei. In 1683 or 1684 a Japanese-speaking slave called Moze was taken up to Edo on the court journey, where Shogun Tsunayoshi questioned him personally about the color of his skin.

Around this handful of foreigners the Japanese authorities maintained a staff of over two hundred. The otona, the ward headman, ran the administration with a deputy, a night watch and a bureau of some seventeen Nagasaki housekeeping families holding a monopoly on supplying the foreigners with all they ate, wore and burned. The interpreters, the tsūji, were a hereditary guild; Kaempfer put them at about 150, while another source says eighty. A senior interpreter drew 1,000 silver taels a year and a junior 400, a very good living for work consisting largely of standing between two parties forbidden to understand each other. Beyond them came secretaries, coolie superintendents, treasurers, accountants and guards, and some three hundred coolies working cargo at the water gate.

The ratio was not an accident. It was the design.

The Women of Maruyama

Maruyama Courtesans, Dejima's Children and Blomhoff's Wife Titia in 1817

No European woman was permitted on the island, so the only women who crossed the bridge were licensed prostitutes from the Maruyama and Yoriai quarters, whose visits were regulated with the same bureaucratic seriousness as the copper quota.

The yūjo were classified by clientele: orandayuki to the Dutch, karayuki to the Chinese, and nihonyuki to Japanese clients only. A night cost a Dutch sailor five rixdollars, about a pound sterling, and stays were capped at three days and renewed until the cap meant nothing. The real money was in gifts, none of which appeared in any ledger, and some women carried raw silk out under their sashes and ginseng root in their hair, being among the very few people who crossed the bridge in both directions, regularly, and were searched by men who had known them for years.

Children complicated the arrangement, because the shogunate had legislated the island into a place where nothing biological was permitted to happen. By decree no Japanese might be born on Dejima, and none might die there; a fatally injured laborer had to be carried across the bridge to expire officially on the mainland. Courtesans attached to the Dutch were the only ones permitted to bear children, and they left the island to give birth. Those children could live on Dejima until they were seven, after which they moved into Nagasaki proper, usually raised by Japanese grandparents, educated as Japanese subjects, and never permitted to leave Japan. Hendrik Doeff left a nine-year-old son, Jōkichi, legally granted the surname Dōfu, and wrote to him from Europe until the boy died at seventeen. Philipp Franz von Siebold's daughter Oine, born in 1827 and left behind when he was expelled, became the first Japanese woman trained in Western medicine.

The rule against European women held for a hundred and seventy-six years and then broke, briefly, in the summer of 1817, when the incoming opperhoofd Jan Cock Blomhoff arrived on the Vrouw Agatha with his wife Titia, their son Johannes, and a nursemaid. The governor objected immediately. Doeff petitioned on the precedent of 1662, when Dutch women fleeing Koxinga's conquest of Taiwan had been given refuge, and the party was allowed ashore while an appeal went to Edo. Titia wrote her own petition, asking to stay to nurse her husband's health and spare her child another ocean, and it is the only petition written by a Western woman to the Japanese government before Meiji. The governor let the breach pass on the grounds that the document was of no consequence, having been written by a woman.

Edo refused. On 2 December 1817 Titia sailed for Batavia. She fell ill there and died in 1821, and her husband, cut off from European news on his island, celebrated her birthday on Dejima that year, ten months after her funeral.

Ninety Days to Edo

The Dutch Court Journey to Edo (Hofreis) and the Shogun's Audience

Once a year, and after 1764 less often, the island turned itself inside out and walked to the capital.

The hofreis, the court journey, took the opperhoofd with his physician and secretary to Edo to pay homage to the shogun. It ran annually from 1633 to 1764, every second year until 1790 and every fourth thereafter. The last was made in 1850. The round trip took about ninety days, and from 1659 the shogunate lengthened it deliberately, requiring the party to cross Kyūshū by road to Shimonoseki and take a boat to Osaka before joining the Tōkaidō, which multiplied the number of officials who got to look at them.

It was ruinously expensive. Zacharias Wagenaer's journey in 1657 cost 15,893 guilders, and by the end of the century the figure regularly exceeded 60,000, most of it in gifts and none of it optional. Before departure every Japanese in the retinue swore a blood oath to report any infringement by the Dutch, and at Hakone the party was searched under the standing rule described as guns up and women down, weapons being what the authorities feared moving toward Edo and hostage wives what they feared moving out.

The audience was choreography. The opperhoofd entered the great hall of Edo Castle on his hands and knees, was announced as the Oranda Kapitan, crawled the length of the engawa, and pressed his face to the floor before the shogun, who stood at the far dark end of the room and was often not distinctly visible. From 1682, under Tsunayoshi, a second and informal audience was added for the ladies of the court, at which the Dutch were required to remove their cloaks, stand upright, walk, jump, dance, play the drunkard, sing High German love songs and speak broken Japanese while the court watched from behind screens. Kaempfer, who performed it, described the proceedings without visible resentment, which suggests an accurate understanding of what the Company was paying for.

What the Company was paying for went home in the baggage. On departure the Dutch received jifuku, ceremonial silk gowns, and delivered in return the Oranda fūsetsugaki, the reports of rumors: a briefing on foreign wars, treaties and shipping compiled from every vessel that had reached Nagasaki that year. For two centuries this was the Tokugawa government's only systematic account of what was happening in the rest of the world, and the price of it was one European crawling across a floor annually and, on request, dancing.

The Pinhole Camera

Rangaku at Dejima: Kaempfer, the Kaitai Shinsho, Siebold and the Word Sakoku

The novelist Shiba Ryōtarō called Dejima a pinhole camera, the single aperture through which a sealed room kept an image of the world in focus, and the metaphor holds precisely because a pinhole works by exclusion. The narrower the hole, the sharper what comes through.

The medicine came first, because medicine was the one European skill Japanese officials wanted badly enough to bend rules for. In 1649 the German barber-surgeon Caspar Schamberger arrived as factory physician, and during a ten-month residence in Edo the following year he instructed court physicians in Western surgery, founding the Caspar-ryū, in effect Japan's first Western medical curriculum.

The naturalists made the island famous in Europe. Engelbert Kaempfer, there from 1690 to 1692, beat the surveillance regime by making himself useful: free medical advice, imported liquor, and mathematics lessons for his interpreters and guards, who repaid him in information. His Amoenitatum Exoticarum of 1712 carried the first systematic description of Japanese plants, 526 species, and his History of Japan, published posthumously in 1727, remained Europe's standard authority for over a century.

The most consequential transmission involved no European at all. On 18 April 1771 three physicians, Sugita Genpaku, Maeno Ryōtaku and Nakagawa Jun'an, attended the dissection of an executed woman at the Kotsugahara execution ground outside Edo. They brought copies of the Ontleedkundige Tafelen, the Dutch translation of Johann Adam Kulmus's anatomical atlas, compared the plates with the body in front of them, and found the European diagrams correct in every particular, the traditional charts wrong. Working with a vocabulary of six or seven hundred Dutch words and no dictionary worth the name, they spent three years and five months on the translation, and floated a five-page trial pamphlet in 1773 to see whether the censors would move. They did not. In August 1774 the five-volume Kaitai shinsho was released, and empirical Western science in Japan dates from it.

Siebold, who had arrived in 1823 charged with a full natural and political survey of Japan, exceeded his brief. Permitted in 1824 to buy a house at Narutaki outside the city, he taught anatomy, chemistry and physics to fifty-six students who paid their fees in specimens and essays. On the court journey of 1826 he traded a map of Russia to the court astronomer Takahashi Kageyasu for copies of Inō Tadataka's coastal survey of Japan. Those maps were a state secret. Takahashi died in prison in 1829 before he could be tried, twenty-three students were arrested, and Siebold was expelled for life, in October 1829 or 1830 depending on the record.

It was also on Dejima, in 1801, that the interpreter Shizuki Tadao translated the appendix in which Kaempfer defended Japan's policy of seclusion, and coined a word for the thing being defended. He took it from a phrase about keeping the country closed up, which had been interpolated by the English translator and appears nowhere in Kaempfer's German. The word was sakoku. It has been the name of the policy ever since, and it was invented in 1801, on the island, by a Japanese employee of the men it was designed to contain.

What the Aperture Let In

Dejima from the Phaeton Incident of 1808 to the Opening of the Ports in 1859

The revisionist case against that word is now the scholarly mainstream: Tokugawa Japan was never closed, only regulated, and the regulation ran through four gateways. Satsuma handled the Ryūkyūs, Tsushima handled Chosŏn Korea, Matsumae the Ainu of Ezochi, and Nagasaki the Chinese and the Dutch. Arano Yasunori's preferred term is kaikin, maritime prohibitions. The long domestic consequences were profound. So were the ones that arrived by sea.

On 4 October 1808 a British frigate came into the Nagasaki roads flying a Dutch flag. She was HMS Phaeton, Captain Fleetwood Pellew, acting on intelligence from Bengal that two Dutch merchantmen were bound for Japan. Japanese harbor officials rowed out with two Dutch clerks from Dejima, in the ordinary way of business, and the British seized the clerks and threatened to burn every ship in the harbor unless supplied with food and water. The governor, Matsudaira Yasuhide, ordered the domains responsible by rotation for the harbor defense to assemble fireships. After two centuries of peace the garrisons were undermanned, the batteries unready, and nothing could be launched. On 5 October the provisions were delivered free of charge and the Phaeton sailed away unmolested.

Matsudaira committed seppuku as soon as she cleared the bay, the daimyō of Saga was placed under house arrest, and the shogunate, having learned that it could not understand the ships in its own harbor, decreed that six Nagasaki interpreters were to study French and six English.

Then Europe collapsed and the island became a curiosity of international law. The Netherlands was annexed by Napoleon, Java fell to Britain in 1811, and for several years Dejima was the only place on earth where the Dutch flag still flew. Not a single Dutch vessel reached Nagasaki between 1809 and 1817. The factory's resources ran out; Doeff and his men, six by the end, distilled corn whisky and pressed wine from wild grapes, and the Nagasaki authorities fed them at state expense. Twice, in 1813 and 1814, Stamford Raffles sent chartered vessels flying Dutch colors to take the factory over, and twice Doeff refused to recognize British authority, backed by interpreters who knew that Japanese law prescribed death for unauthorized intruders.

In the late summer of 1844 the Dutch warship Palembang anchored at Nagasaki carrying a personal letter from King William II to Shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi, describing the outcome of the Opium War and advising Japan to open her ports voluntarily while the choice was still hers. On 5 July 1845 the shogunate replied, thanking the King for his friendship and declining his advice: the laws of seclusion were ancestral law and could not be altered for any foreign nation. Nabeshima Naomasa of Saga, whose domain had been humiliated by the Phaeton, went aboard the Palembang to look at her guns, went home, and built reverberatory furnaces and a cannon foundry from Dutch textbooks.

In 1852 the chief factor Donker Curtius told the Nagasaki authorities in plain terms that an American squadron under Perry would shortly arrive to demand a treaty, which it did. In 1855 the Nagasaki Naval Training Center opened, twenty-two Dutch instructors teaching marine architecture, gunnery and navigation to seventy hand-picked young men, the most distinguished of whom, Katsu Kaishū, founded the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The treaty of 30 January 1856 let the Dutch walk out of Dejima into the town and permitted them, for the first time since 1640, to practice Christianity openly, and the fumi-e was abolished that April. The commercial treaty of 18 August 1858 ended the monopoly, the ports opened on 4 July 1859, and in 1860 Dejima ceased to be a trading station at all.

The Island Under the City

What Happened to Dejima: Landfill in 1904, Excavation and Reconstruction

What finally killed Dejima was not policy. It was dredging.

The first phase of Nagasaki's harbor improvement, in 1893, cut about eighteen meters off the island's north side and joined its east end to the mainland. The second, in 1904, reclaimed the curved southern shore entirely. The fan disappeared into the street grid, and for most of the twentieth century the most consequential three acres in the history of Japanese foreign relations were a block of ordinary Nagasaki with a plaque on it. The site was designated a National Historic Site in 1922, and Nagasaki City began buying the land back, plot by plot, in 1951. The purchase alone took half a century.

The excavations have produced roughly 700,000 artifacts, and the interesting thing is how legible the island's supply lines are in the rubbish: Hizen porcelain from the local kilns, Chinese Jingdezhen ware, Delftware, German Bartmann jugs, the bearded stoneware bottles the Japanese called hige-tokkuri, clay pipes, roof tiles, animal bone, and the cesspits of a small town. Materials analysis of the brickwork found that the red bricks came mainly from Fort Zeelandia at Tainan in Taiwan and the yellow from the Netherlands, which means the island was partly built out of a Dutch fort the Dutch had already lost.

Reconstruction had an unusual advantage. Jan Cock Blomhoff, the same man whose wife was deported in 1817, had commissioned a scale model of the island at one thirtieth actual size. It went home to the Netherlands and survived, and it is now the primary evidence for architectural detail no document records. Sixteen early nineteenth-century buildings now stand on the site, raised in three phases between 1996 and 2016, and the Omotemon bridge opened in November 2017; the plan is eventually to move the Nakashima and Doza rivers and put water back on all four sides.

The men who lived there would have found the effort baffling. To the merchants who paid for it, Dejima was a rental property extracted under duress. To the shogunate it was a quarantine facility that happened to generate customs revenue. To the Company it was the least agreeable posting in Asia and, for sixty years, the most profitable. To the tsūji who worked it, it was a hereditary job standing between two parties forbidden to speak to each other, and it turned a few of them into the first modern scientists in Japan.

Nobody built it as a window. It was built as a wall, by a government that had decided the safest thing to do with foreigners was to put them somewhere they could be counted, and the wall worked exactly as designed for two hundred and eighteen years. What nobody anticipated was that a wall with one gate in it is also a lens, and that everything forced through a single small opening arrives sharper than it has any right to. Japan looked through it at the Opium War, the steam engine and the smallpox vaccine, and drew the conclusions that the men who dug the fill out of a demolished hillside in 1634 would have considered the last conceivable outcome of their work.

Sources & Further Reading

Blussé, Leonard. Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans. Harvard University Press, 2008. Sets Dejima alongside the other controlled European entrepôts of East Asia and explains why a walled trading enclave looked like sound policy to every government that built one.

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. University of California Press, 1951. The standard narrative frame for the Portuguese confinement of 1636, the Shimabara aftermath and the expulsion edicts that emptied the island.

Boxer, C. R. The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555-1640. Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959. The source of record for the Macau silk and silver figures, the respondência system and the destruction of Macau's economy after 1639.

Boxer, C. R. Jan Compagnie in Japan, 1600-1850. Martinus Nijhoff, 1950. The essential account of the VOC factory's finances, profitability and cultural traffic, and of the court journey to Edo as the Company experienced it.

Doeff, Hendrik. Recollections of Japan. Translated by Annick M. Doeff. Trafford Publishing, 2003. The stranded opperhoofd's own memoir of the Napoleonic isolation, the Raffles intrusions and the compilation of the Dutch-Japanese dictionary.

Goodman, Grant K. Japan and the Dutch, 1600-1853. Curzon Press, 2000. Traces the rangaku pipeline from the Nagasaki interpreters to the scholars of Edo, and the institutional consequences of the Kaitai shinsho.

Hesselink, Reinier H. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560-1640. McFarland, 2016. Explains the Nagasaki merchant elite, the town elders and the municipal politics that produced the twenty-five men ordered to finance the island.

Kaempfer, Engelbert. Kaempfer's Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed. Edited and translated by Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey. University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. The fullest eyewitness description of the island's layout, the rules of confinement and the Edo audiences, including the measurements that disagree with each other.

Keene, Donald. The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830. Stanford University Press, 1969. The standard account of rangaku, the interpreters' role and the making of the Kaitai shinsho.

Massarella, Derek. A World Elsewhere: Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press, 1990. Places the Dutch acquisition of the Japan trade in the context of European commercial competition and corrects several durable myths about the factory.

Screech, Timon. The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan. University of Hawai'i Press, 1996. Follows the instruments, images and anatomical ideas that left Dejima for Edo and what Japanese scholars did with them.

Toby, Ronald P. State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu. Princeton University Press, 1984. The foundational statement of the case that Japan was never closed, and of the four-gateway model within which Nagasaki was one aperture among several.