The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch encounter with Tokugawa Japan by Adam Clulow (review)

Tales about Dutch-Asiatic encounters in the seventeenth century today increasingly revolve on violence, diplomacy and the limits of European power rather than on the humdrum matter of commercial relations. The dominant narrative now pictures the Dutch East-India Company (VOC) primarily as a privateering enterprise or an aspiring sovereign entity rather than as a crafty business corporation. Adam Clulow’s book on the early encounters between the Dutch East-India Company and Tokugawa Japan fits neatly in this trend. Clulow aims to show how and why the VOC, despite its initial pretensions as a sovereign power dealing on an equal footing with the Japanese regime, saw itself eventually forced into a dependent, subordinate position vis-à-vis the shogun. The Dutch had to adapt themselves to the political and moral order imposed by the Japanese, not the other way around.

Clulow’s chosen method is to study a series of confrontations between Company officials and the Bakufu between about 1610 and the early 1660s, in which the Dutch step-by-step had to give ground to the wishes and demands of the Japanese, culminating in the obligation for the opperhoofd of the VOC in Deshima (Nagasaki) to make an annual ceremonial journey to Edo to pay the Company’s respects to its lord, the shogun. These episodes are grouped under the headings of diplomacy, violence and sovereignty, which correspond to the powers granted by the States-General to the VOC in 1602 for its dealings with powers in Asia. In each of these domains, Clulow points out, the Company had to retreat from his initial position and accommodate itself to the Bakufu’s requirements. It changed its profile from representative of “the king of Holland” to loyal vassal of the shogun, it relinquished the use of violence against foreign ships and merchants in East Asian waters and it even delivered one of its highest employees in the region, the governor of Tayouan on Taiwan, into the hands of Japanese authorities.

The lively descriptions of the recurrent conflicts and trials of strengths between the Dutch and Japanese are the highlights of this book. Clulow tells fascinating stories about how relations between the VOC and the shogun developed over time, using a variety of Japanese and Dutch sources to exceedingly good effect. Comparisons with experiences of the Portuguese, the English and the Chinese serve to illuminate and refine the argument. The Company and the Shogun is definitely a good read and a sound piece of scholarship.

However, the book is much weaker when it comes to explaining “why the Dutch ended up where they did in Tokugawa Japan,” as the author claimed to achieve at the outset (20, italics mine). The final chapter only draws a brief comparison between the situation in Japan and other parts of Asia and concludes that “European footholds in Asia did not invariably morph from isolated trading posts into fortified bases before finally becoming full colonies” and that “Japan provides the emblematic dead end for European enterprises in Asia” (262). Leaving aside the fact that the VOC never considered colonizing Japan, this conclusion fails to address the question why the shogun, given the long series of conflicts with the Company after 1610, still allowed the Dutch to retain a foothold (alone among all their European rivals) or why the VOC bothered to keep a trading post in Japan at all.

A more nuanced interpretation is struggling to get out, but fails to get acknowledged, because the author, on the one hand, underplays the vulnerability in the shogun’s position and, on the other hand, almost entirely ignores the commercial side of the VOC’s operations. The evidence is plainly there—in quotations from contemporaries (both Japanese and Dutch), in asides from the author himself and in solid studies by other scholars. The shogun and the VOC were much more mutually dependent than Clulow seems to allow (except in an aside on 97 when he wonders “who was actually tricking...