ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the struggles of diplomatic embassies from East India Companies in the seventeenth century to incorporate themselves into the Japanese diplomatic sphere, focusing on their practices rather than their world views. The Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) failed to maintain diplomatic correspondence in 1627 and decided to rely on the merchants in Hirado. Along with the Tokugawa state formation around 1640 the Dutch merchants in Japan transformed into ‘pseudo-subjects’ of the Tokugawa state. Even after that East India Companies sent letters to the shogunate, but the shogunate treated the envoys not as diplomatic embassies but as merchants coming to petition for trade.
