Dejima

1 · POSITION

Dejima is the fan-shaped artificial island, 120 metres by 75, built in Nagasaki harbour between 1634 and 1636 to hold the Portuguese traders, and from 1641 the Dutch trading post — for two centuries the only place in Japan where Europeans were allowed to live. It was not a hotel. The register holds it as the most important record in Japan of how a foreign guest was housed. [1, 2]

2 · TWENTY DUTCHMEN

The island held houses for about twenty Dutchmen, warehouses, and quarters for the Japanese officials who watched them, with some fifty subordinates and about a hundred and fifty interpreters attached. For more than two hundred years the Dutch could not set foot in Japan beyond its bridge, and lived in poor conditions. Their chief, the opperhoofd, was called kapitan by the Japanese. [1]

3 · THE JOURNEY TO EDO

Once a year from 1660 to 1790, and once every four years after, the Dutch delegation travelled to Edo to pay its respects to the shogun — the only journey through Japan its guests were permitted, made along the post roads the register holds as the Tōkaidō. [1]

4 · REBUILT

Dejima was designated a national historic site in 1922; restoration began in 1953, and since 1996 Nagasaki has been rebuilding twenty-five of its early nineteenth-century buildings — sixteen were standing by 2021, the chief factor’s residence among them. The long-term aim is to make it an island again, surrounded by water. [1, 2]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The Dutch are said to have stayed until 1854 by one source and the post to have run to 1858 by both, when the treaty abolished it and the site became a consulate. The Dutch delegation’s use of the Tōkaidō is the register’s connection, not a statement of the sources. [1–2]