ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the manifestation and representations of emotion in the encounter of East and West that took place between Dutch and Japanese individuals during the period of Japan’s seclusion. It focuses, firstly, on representative Japanese artistic and associated literary images of the West as a primary source for reading emotion in this East-West encounter. Lust, love and curiosity are all emotions that are potentially attributable to scenes of sexual intimacy that took place in Dejima, which were portrayed in a Japanese art form, shunga. The chapter contextualizes these visual representations of purported emotion by examining their Dutch and Japanese cultural settings, and the artistic traditions of this genre. It then extends to briefly consider other emotional threads – love and curiosity – that are discernible as arising from this narrow ‘node of contact’ that contributed to the two-way flows of mutually desired information.
