This book was conceived in 2005 when Ōta Atsushi and Shimada Ryūto, two graduates of the pioneering TANAP (Towards a New Age of Partnership) program, which aimed to train a new generation of scholars in the use of Dutch archives, decided to publish a collection of essays in celebration of Professor Leonard Blussé. As many readers of this journal will know, Blussé, who was due to retire from Leiden University in 2011, is widely recognized as one of the great scholars of the Dutch in Asia and his work has had a significant impact on the field over the past four decades. His contribution extends across all aspects of academic endeavor, but he is most famous for his work as an innovative scholar, a seemingly tireless organizer of massive translation/publication projects of archival sources, and an enthusiastic teacher.
As an appendix, Large and Broad contains a list of Blussé's publications, which even in abbreviated form covers ten pages and includes more than forty monographs and edited volumes. Even for scholars familiar with this work, one is reminded of the tremendous range of Blussé's studies and the fact that some of his earliest articles immediately became standard resources for anyone working on Dutch expansion in Asia. The list is dotted with numerous source publications, including the Deshima Dagregisters, De Dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia and The Formosan Encounter, that have transformed the field by making archival materials accessible to new groups of scholars. While the range and quality of publications puts Blussé into the first rank of scholars, it is even more impressive when paired with his record as a teacher. The TANAP program, in which Blussé was a driving force, has introduced an entirely new group of scholars to VOC materials and provided them with the tools to read these sources. Its legacy is the TANAP Monographs on the History of Asian-European Interaction (Brill), which consists of (at time of writing) thirteen volumes that illuminate the Company's dealings with different parts of Asia. As an educational program, TANAP was unrivalled and its influence will be felt for decades to come.
This collection was published in Japan and it stems from Blussé's long and productive connection with the scholarly community there. Eight of the twelve contributors are based in Japan and all have studied or worked there. For Japanese researchers, Blussé has long served as a vital point of contact with the VOC archives and his office became the first stop for countless research trips. One is reminded of this by the moving account provided by Nagazumi Yōko, another prolific scholar and the editor of this volume, of a trip she made to the Netherlands with her husband, Akira, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Each of the contributors has been helped in some way by Blussé and some owe their start in academia largely to his encouragement. This connection means that rather than responding directly to Blussé's own work, the essays cover a broad array of individual research topics. Although they are not grouped together in any particular logic within the collection, the chapters can perhaps be divided productively into three sections.
Chapters 4 through 7, which form one of the most interesting sections of the book, are all loosely concerned with Nagasaki, a multi-ethnic port city that functioned as a crucial conduit for the flow of goods and information into Japan in the early modern period. Patrizia Carioti and Suzuki Yasuko examine two vital but under-studied institutions: the Chinese interpreters (tōtsūji 唐通事) and the Nagasaki governor (bugyō 長崎奉行). While we know that Japan was never a closed country, much work remains to be done on the mechanics of its four “windows” to the world and it is in this regard that these two articles are particularly useful. The duties of the Chinese interpreters, which included the actual process of translation, checking documents for any reference to Christianity, policing the Chinese community, overseeing commercial transactions and acting as intermediaries with local authorities, placed these officials at the very center of trade in Nagasaki. In addition to managing relations with shogunal (bakufu) officials, they were also forced to contend with a constantly changing Chinese trading community, and Carioti does a good job of highlighting the role of the interpreters in preserving the balance between different groups of merchants.
Suzuki's chapter is a translation of one part of her monograph on the Nagasaki governor and shows how the office evolved in the last two decades of the seventeenth century.Footnote 1 The bugyō occupied a difficult position on the frontline of the bakufu's war with Christianity, tasked at the same time with managing troublesome groups of foreign merchants and constantly changing trading conditions. The combination of challenges could prove fatal, particularly in the first half of the seventeenth century when the opportunities for personal enrichment were legion, and at least one incumbent was forced to commit suicide as a result of corruption charges. Suzuki shows that the status of the office, which had previously been somewhat marginalized within larger bakufu structures, improved as officials in Edo began to recognize the importance of the port city. She does this by analyzing seating patterns in Edo castle, which provide decisive evidence of a shift in bakufu policy towards the governor.
Isabel Tanaka-Van Daalen examines channels of communication between VOC headquarters in Batavia and the shogun in Edo. She focuses on documents sent by three Governors-General in Batavia (Antonio van Diemen in 1642, Joan Maetsuijcker in 1675 and Cornelis Speelman in 1683) in an attempt to break through local intermediaries in Nagasaki to protest trading restrictions and effect a change in shogunal policy. These letters were vital instruments for direct communication, although they delivered mixed results, and Tanaka-Van Daalen provides important details about the documents and the nature of the translation process. She argues that the third letter was the most successful of the three, partly because it built on previous mistakes.
Matsukata Fuyuko, who through her recent book Oranda fūsetsugaki to kinsei Nihon (“Dutch Reporting of World News during the Tokugawa Period”) has established herself as the preeminent authority on Dutch news reports (fūsetsugaki 風説書) submitted to the shogun by the head of the factory in Nagasaki, documents an important shift in the nature of these reports and hence in the bakufu's awareness of changes in the international environment.Footnote 2 In her article, Matsukata provides further evidence that these reports were subject to manipulation by Dutch agents, and offers a series of examples documenting the ways in which news related to the French Revolution and subsequent changes in Dutch politics were distorted beyond recognition. The central point of the article concerns a telling change from a consistent, almost obsessive focus on Catholicism in the seventeenth century to a new interest in Western imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
A second group of four essays (Chapters 3, 8, 10 and 12) focuses on trade with Japan during the Tokugawa period. Iioka Naoko examines the silk trade with Tonkin, which flourished for much of the seventeenth century until the Qing lifted bans on maritime shipping in 1684, thereby cutting away the need for this alternative route. Shimada Ryūto, author of one of the TANAP monographs, provides a detailed analysis of products shipped from Siam to Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cynthia Viallé, a long-time Blussé collaborator and a key participant in a number of translation projects, has contributed a detailed article on a piece of lacquerware shipped from Japan to Batavia and then sent on to Europe to serve as a diplomatic gift for the consort of the English monarch. Martha Chaiklin examines another rare but far more grotesque item: fabricated remains of mermaids. Mermaids were, it becomes clear, an item that crossed national boundaries, and fakes produced to satisfy a domestic audience in Japan could be equally successful and, if managed correctly, far more profitable abroad.
A third set of essays (Chapters 1, 2, 9 and 11) examines diverse topics. Ōta Atsushi, another author in the TANAP series, considers the role of Islam in legitimating the ruling dynasty of Banten. Tominaga Yasuyo provides a study of Kartini, a groundbreaking writer in nineteenth-century Java, while Wada Ikuko explores the Dutch East India Company's diamond trade in India. Finally, in an essay that examines VOC sources from Japan in a very different light, Tsukahara Tōgo explains the value of meteorological data collected by Dutch employees in Nagasaki in reconstructing changes in the climate.
As with many such collections, this volume would have benefitted from a clearer delineation of theme. Because each essay jumps to a separate topic, Large and Broad is not particularly easy to read in one sitting, although the quality of the individual submissions remains consistently high. Scholars working on the Dutch East India Company in Japan will find the volume of particular use in that it provides valuable summaries of current research by a wide range of scholars, a number of whom do not typically publish in English.
While we will certainly see less of Blussé the teacher in the future, he shows no signs of turning away from his research and we can only await further additions to his already copious body of work. In the meantime, this book stands as a tribute to an outstanding career.
