Japan-Netherlands Trade 1600–1800: The Dutch East India Company and Beyond by Suzuki Yasuko (review)

With the relatively recent reorganization of Japan’s public universities into autonomous institutions, the formerly automatic support for the humanities by the Ministry of Education has become contingent upon the support of those sectors of the universities that bring in the most money, i.e., medicine and the natural sciences. These departments have been routinely publishing the results of their research in English-language journals, and so it is not surprising that they are starting to hold the humanities in their institutions to the same standards. A translation of a study on a medical, mathematical, or mechanical topic, however, is relatively straightforward and can be understood and appreciated even if the English in which the research is presented is rudimentary. This is quite different in the humanities, where the success of presenting the results of high-level research often depends on a sophisticated ability to express oneself.

Consequently, Japanese scholars in the humanities are now experiencing more and more frequently that sinking feeling of being between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the pressure from their colleagues in the sciences demands that they publish in English, but on the other hand they feel helpless in the awareness of the level of English required. Not surprisingly, this effort to publish in English by Japanese scholars in the humanities is still in its infancy.¹ The book under review is a translation of a study published in Japanese in 2004.² Thus, Suzuki Yasuko is, so to speak, in the vanguard of an exciting, new trend in Japan. She is to be congratulated for undertaking a daunting task such as the translation of a book-length piece of research. If I am, hereafter, critical of the result, my remarks should in no way detract from my admiration for the author’s gumption in taking up the challenge of her peers. They should, instead, be taken as a warning that undertaking an English translation of one’s research may be more difficult than conducting the research itself.

In this study, Suzuki has chosen to view the Japanese-Dutch trade from the point of view of the products exported from Japan. This is, in contrast to the great variety of products imported to Japan by the Dutch, a relatively straightforward topic. The first five chapters of the book follow the types of products Japan exported: silver (chapter 1), copper (chapters 2 and 3), gold (chapter 4), and camphor (chapter 5), the last of which explains the historical background of the production of camphor, describes its major production centers in Japan, and follows the exported product into the markets for which it was destined. This is such a clear working method that one wonders why it was not followed for the sections on the different metals as well.

Some of the information the author presents is fascinating. The increase of Japanese copper exports, from the 1650s, is linked to the rise in demand for the metal on the Amsterdam market because of the Anglo-Dutch wars and later because of the wars between Sweden and Denmark, which interrupted the flow of copper from Sweden to the Netherlands (pp. 76–77). So many wars required prodigious amounts of copper to cast cannon for ships. The same thing happened in Asia when the Mughal empire was subduing the kingdom of Golconda: copper sales went up on the east coast of the Indian subcontinent and the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) stepped in to supply the necessary copper which it procured from Japan (p. 80). On the other hand, the decrease in the export of precious metals is linked by the author to the increasing expansion of the Japanese economy in the eighteenth century which necessitated the domestic use of these metals (pp. 190–91).

Apart from such nuggets, however, I wish the author had given more thought to...