Adam Clulow

Unjust, Cruel and Barbarous Proceedings: Japanese Mercenaries and the Amboyna Incident of 1623

In 1623, the Dutch governor of Amboyna, an important clove-producing island in modern-day Indonesia, executed a group of English merchants and Japanese mercenaries accused of plotting to seize control of the VOC castle on the island. After news of these events reached Europe, the Amboyna Massacre, as it came to be called in England, rapidly became invested with great consequences as English and Dutch leaders fought over the issues of blame and compensation. This article examines the Japanese mercenaries accused by the VOC, the silent participants whose cause was not taken up by any national government.

From Global Entrepôt to Early Modern Domain: Hirado, 1609-1641

IN the first decades of the seventeenth century, the castle town of Hirado in northwestern Kyushu appeared to be booming. Starting around 1609, it welcomed dozens of ships and hundreds of merchants from distant ports in Europe and Asia into the narrow confines of its sheltered harbor. The Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), which was in the process of expanding rapidly throughout Asia, used Hirado as its primary base in Japan for just over three decades until 1641, when its operations were forcibly relocated to Nagasaki. The town also hosted an active community of Chinese traders, led by their famous captain Li Dan , and a small group of English merchants. Dutch visitors, who produced the most detailed descriptions of Hirado in this period, argued consistently that the arrival of foreign merchant groups—and particularly the appearance of the Company’s ships—had transformed the port from a poor fishing village into a global entrepôt and ushered in a period of unprecedented prosperity for the domain and the Matsura family that ruled it.1 According to one observer, foreign trade brought vast profits, tremendous prestige, and a general affluence that far exceeded anything enjoyed by the Matsura’s ancestors.2 Modern scholars writing primarily in Japanese have largely accepted this positive vision, describing the period from 1609 to 1641 as one of sustained “prosperity” (han’ei ) during which the Matsura skillfully rode the “trade boom” to enrich themselves and fill the domain’s coffers.3 Others go even further by labeling this era as Hirado’s “golden age.”4

Empires and protection: Making interpolity law in the early modern world

References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about the dual character of protection that differentiate between ‘inside’ protection of subjects and ‘outside’ protection of allies and other external groups. Rather than a clear division, we find a blurring of lines, with many protection claims creatively combining ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ protection. We argue that the juxtaposition of these ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection underpinned the formation of irregular, interpenetrating zones of imperial suzerainty in crowded maritime arenas and conflict-ridden borderlands across the early modern world.

European Maritime Violence and Territorial States in Early Modern Asia, 1600-1650

The European overseas enterprises that began to push into Asian waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were maritime organisations geared towards commerce and seaborne warfare. As such, they looked very different from the powerful territorial states like Mughal India that traditionally dominated early modern Asia, and they were able to create a new kind of empire consisting of a network of fortified ports and trading centres connected by long sea routes. The construction of these empires was initially driven and subsequently sustained by maritime technology. To borrow Carlo Cipollas words, guns, sails, and empire were always bound tightly together in this period. European vessels held a significant advantage over local shipping; neither the wealthiest groups of merchants nor the most formidable Asian states were in a position to field maritime forces that could challenge them on the open ocean. In virtually every encounter at sea, ships from Europe were able to inflict overwhelming defeats on the fleets assembled to oppose them. Since it represented their most significant advantage, Europeans made frequent use of maritime violence: against competing merchant groups (in order to disrupt commercial networks and to gain a dominant position), and against Asian states (to pry open port cities and improve trading conditions). This article explores the role played by maritime violence in the relationship between European overseas enterprises and two powerful territorial states, Mughal India (1526-1757) and Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Commemorating Failure: The Four Hundredth Anniversary of England's Trading Outpost in Japan

On 11 June 1613, a strange vessel sailed into the port of Hirado 平戸 on the western island of Kyushu. Dispatched more than two years earlier by the English East India Company, the Clove brought with it seventy-one mariners, a varied collection of trading goods, and grand ambitions to establish a foothold in the rich Japanese market. After initial negotiations with the local lord, the leader of the expedition, John Saris, set off for central Japan in search of an audience with the retired shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu 徳川家康 (1543–1616), the last of Japan’s three great unifiers and the founder of a regime that had succeeded in entrenching its power over a fractious archipelago. Arriving at Ieyasu’s headquarters of Sunpu 駿府 (in modernday Shizuoka prefecture) in early September, Saris set about obtaining generous trading concessions from Tokugawa authorities. The product of these negotiations was the so-called English factory in Japan, which was established in Hirado in 1613 and placed under the direction of Saris’s trusted deputy, Richard Cocks. There the outpost remained for just over a decade, until December 1623, when Cocks’s superiors made the decision to formally abandon it. The result was the virtual suspension of English contact with Japan until the nineteenth century, when the government that had been founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu began first to totter and eventually to collapse. This year, 2013, marks the four hundredth anniversary of the English factory in Japan. Although all anniversaries are essentially arbitrary, and although the lapse of exactly four centuries since the outpost’s establishment has no particular significance, such occasions do have their uses, prompting if nothing else a moment of reflection on the current state of research concerning the history of the English experience in Japan. They can also be used, perhaps more productively, as opportunities to consider possible directions for future investigation. The starting point for such an exercise is with two incontrovertible, albeit somewhat paradoxical, facts that underpin the history

The pirate and the warlord

Abstract Starting in the second half of the sixteenth century, Japan, and especially Kyushu, experienced a surge in maritime exchange that was unprecedented in Japanese history. Alongside the boom in trade, there was a concurrent swell in maritime violence as pirates and privateers militarized East Asian waters. During this period, the port of Hirado on Kyushu emerged as one of the most important and consistently active pirate hubs, becoming a base for Chinese, Dutch, English, and Japanese mariners. This article explores Hirado’s long association with piracy and uses it to reflect on the changing nature of maritime violence in East Asia.

Like Lambs in Japan and Devils outside Their Land: Diplomacy, Violence, and Japanese Merchants in Southeast Asia

Beginning in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the effective ruler of Japan, sent dozens of letters to Cochinchina, Cambodia, Patani, the Philippines, and other states and colonies scattered across Southeast Asia. The dispatch of these documents marked a significant shift in Japanese diplomatic patterns. For the first time, Japan broke decisively from the confines of East Asia to connect with wider networks of trade and diplomacy. If the fact that such documents could be sent in the first place reveals new possibilities for engagement, their content highlights some of the problems created by the expansion of maritime trade routes in this period. Dispatched in response to a string of incidents in ports across the region, these letters provide clear evidence of the frequent violence that accompanied the Japanese push into Southeast Asia. In their willingness to shift easily between trade and violence, Japanese merchants bear a striking resemblance to their European rivals who appeared in the region at roughly the same time, and the last section of this article focuses on what these letters can tell us both about the similarities but also the key differences between these groups. In particular, it argues that these documents reveal a divergent attitude toward the relationship between state and subject that accounts in part for the relative success that Europeans enjoyed in early modern Asia.

King Willem II's 1844 Letter to the Shogun: "Recommendation to Open the Country"

On 15 August 1844, a letter signed by King Willem II of the Netherlands arrived in Nagasaki aboard the Dutch East Indies frigate Palembang. The letter was conveyed to bakufu officials in Edo, who responded with their own document addressed to the Dutch government. The receipt of the king’s missive, known conventionally as his “recommendation to open the country” (kaikoku kankoku 開 国勧告), represents an important moment in the history of Japan’s engagement with the outside world. Japanese high-school textbooks invariably reference the incident; one explains that “in 1844 (the first year of the Kōka era), the king of the Netherlands dispatched a letter urging Japan to learn from the lesson of the Opium War and open itself to trade, but the bakufu rejected [this advice].”1 The present study reassesses the purpose, outcome, and broader significance of the king’s letter. The Tokugawa bakufu’s 1825 Foreign Vessels Expulsion Order (ikokusen uchiharai rei 異国船打払令) dictated that foreign vessels must be driven away by force, but in 1842 the regime appeared to withdraw from this hard-line stance when it issued a second edict, the Order for the Provision of Firewood and Water (shinsui kyūyorei 薪水給与令), which stipulated that incoming vessels should be provided with basic supplies. Willem’s letter sought to gauge the extent to which the bakufu’s attitude toward foreigners had changed with the 1842 order. As such, it stemmed from a Dutch desire to preserve their long-held monopoly over trade with Japan and was not the selfless gesture of friendship that it is so often depicted to be. In addition

From White to Yellow: The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300–1735 by Rotem Kowner (review)

In conclusion, Tokita suggests that Japanese oral narrative does not fit well with crosscultural models, though such models provide useful analytical tools. She sees an evolution from stichic repetitions of lines that are metrically uniform and sung with the same melody to the complex use of various melodies, which diversified by repeatedly raising the register. Finally, she notes the continued importance of performed narrative and the fact that new genres have been created in the modern era. Tokita’s work will be of great interest to musicologists, and scholars in related fields will also certainly have occasion to consult this substantive study.

G.G. Rowley, An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in Seventeenth-century Japan

Sato, Barbara, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media and Women in Interwar Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Shimizu, Hiroshi, ‘Karayuki‐san and the Japanese Economic Advance into British Malaya, 1870–1920’, Asian Studies Review 20:3 (1997): 107–132. Silverberg, Miriam, ‘The Modern Girl as Militant’, in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 239–266.