ABSTRACT
There were a number of written reports and various accounts concerning the Opium War that circulated in Japan at the time, and I would now like to take a look at some of the more important of the historical materials I have acquired. Generally speaking, there were two sorts of contemporaneous reports: those conveyed as part of overseas intelligence which the shogunate obtained, via the Nagasaki Administrator (bugyō), from the director (or ‘Captain’) a of the Dutch trading factory at the island of Deshima, near Nagasaki; and those conveyed piecemeal from Chinese merchant vessels that called at the port of Nagasaki. In his preface to the Ahen ibun, the editor Shionoya Tōin wrote: ‘I worked to compile news from the documents and detailed records of the Chinese merchants and Dutch residents here. They have filled to overflowing the box in which I keep them, and it is sufficient to make me realize the great quantity of detail here.’ 1
