The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan: Gift Giving and Diplomacy by Michael Laver (review)

Having made the case, implicitly as well as explicitly, for the importance of the Nationaal Archief (National Archives of the Netherlands) for the study of early modern Japan,¹ I am always happy to see a new book on the Dutch in Japan, especially one that draws upon this archive and the research it has generated over the last century and a half. The Dutch, of course, were not the only Europeans to have left records that help us reconstruct certain aspects of Japanese history. The Jesuit and mendicant orders also produced an impressive number of letters in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin between the 1550s and 1630s. The letters and diaries of the members of the English factory in Hirado between 1613 and 1622 contain much valuable material on daily life in Japan as well. The importance of both these types of sources, however, pales in comparison to the volume and duration (spanning three centuries) of the letters, diaries, account books, statistics, order lists, trade analyses, etc. produced by the Dutch. What is more, these Dutch sources cover all of Asia, in the Roman sense of the word, that is, everything east of what is now Turkey. Thus, these sources allow for broad contextualization, and they often offer unexpected glimpses behind the scenes that various native record keepers would have been eager to leave unknown.

Michael Laver's topic is gift giving and how it relates to the diplomacy of the Dutch in Japan. Gifts were employed on all levels of the interaction between the Dutch and their Japanese minders. In fact, Laver writes that "the entire VOC presence in Japan was an elaborate pageant meant to demonstrate Dutch submission to the authorities in Edo, and, by extension, shogunal authority in Nagasaki" (p. 35). Gifts, in other words, were the physical evidence that was continuously needed to cement the submission and continue the Dutch trade.

In this account of Dutch gift giving, however, we never learn what happened to these gifts once they had been received, as the book pays no attention to how gifts appear in Japanese sources.² Regrettably, we also do not learn the details of who received what and how much. Because all gifts presented in Edo and Nagasaki were carefully calibrated as to their quantity and quality by the Japanese interpreters (people much maligned by the Dutch merchants themselves), a study concentrating on these gifts should be able to teach us much about the details of the Tokugawa hierarchy. This is not a study, however, that gives a clear analysis of the minutiae of Dutch gift giving in Japan. We are left with the author's eclectic and sometimes humorous selections of Dutch gifts divided into categories of exotic animals, works of art and craftsmanship, scientific paraphernalia, and food and drink, which correspond to his chapters 2 through 5 and in which examples from some 250 years of gift giving are knitted together.

Naturally, the book's contribution to the history of the Dutch in Japan between (roughly) 1600 and 1850 will have to be judged against its use of the primary sources available in the Nationaal Archief. It is here, however, that this reviewer has found himself disappointed. The author states that this archive has been "the major archival source" for his book, but he ends the same paragraph by noting that "most of the sources for this book come from the edited versions of these archives" (p. 153), referring to excerpts made for the volumes of The Deshima Daghregisters, published in Leiden by the Institute for the History of European Expansion. Using these translations (made by people exclusively trained in Dutch paleography), however, is a recipe for disaster for those who want to use them to write Japanese history.

A few instances will illustrate the problematic use of primary sources in Laver's book. Throughout the...