ABSTRACT
With Europeans banned from Japan in 1641, the Jesuits, in their theatre and their histories, represented the (Christian) Japanese, especially the martyrs who had refused to apostatize, as models of Christian virtue, and almost indistinguishable from Europeans. Yet, with the Dutch having supplanted the Portuguese in the East, Japanese luxury goods, including lacquerware, chinaware, arrived in Amsterdam, alongside the products of the Dutch East Indies, which Europeans found impossible to replicate, creating an image of the, now mysterious, Japanese as expert artisans. In the 18th century, the History of Japan written by Engelbert Kaempfer, a doctor on the Dutch trading post in Japan in the 1690s, became the definitive account of the Japanese. He claimed that Japan was a “closed country”, and described the subservience of the mercantile Dutch to the autocratic Tokugawa shogun, to the chagrin of many Europeans. With so little information on Japan, the Japanese now became fantasy characters in European satirical writing, such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Finally, after 200 years, in 1853, determined to re-establish trade with Japan, US warships arrived in Tokyo Bay and Japan was forced to “open” to the West.
