Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns

Isaac Titsingh was intermittently head of the (trading station) of the Dutch from 1779 to 1784. He was a career merchant, but unusual in having a classical education and training as a physician. His impact on Japan was enormous, but he left disappointed in the ability of the country to embrace change. After many years in Java, India and China, he came to London, then settled in , where he devoted himself to compiling translations of prime Japanese texts. His is one of the most exciting anthologies of the period and reveals the almost unknown world of eighteenth-century Japan, discussing politics, history, poetry and rituals. Titsingh’s Illustrations of Japan appeared posthumously in 1820–1822 in English, French and Dutch. This fully annotated edition makes selections from the original English version available for the first time in nearly two centuries.

Timon Screech is Reader in the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where he has taught since 1991. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the culture of the period in both Japanese and English.

Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779–1822

Annotated and introduced by Timon Screech First published 2006 by 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Timon Screech All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Screech, Timon. Secret memoirs of the shoguns : Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779–1822 / annotated and introduced by Timon Screech. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Japan–History–To 1868. 2. Japan–Social life and customs–1600–1868. 3. Titsingh, Isaac, 1744–1812. I. Title. DS835 .S356 2005 952′ .025–dc22 2005005265

ISBN 0–700–71720–X This work may lead the reader to suppose that the Japanese sink the more important matters in an ocean of frivolities; but before he adopts so harsh a notion respecting a people who are not inferior in politeness to the most distinguished nations of Europe, he ought to consider their present situation, and to acquire a smattering at least of their history. Isaac Titsingh

This edition is dedicated to my father, M. A. Screech

Contents

List of figures xi Acknowledgements xv

Introduction 1

PART I Secret memoirs of the shoguns 75

1 Before the Tokugawa 77 2 Ieyasu, the Gongen, to Ietsugu 82 3 Yoshimune, the eighth shogun 99 4 Ieshige to Ienari 129

PART II Essays on Japanese civilisation 159

5 On the legal suicide of the Japanese 161 6 On Japanese poetry 163 7 The character of the Japanese people, and a history of East–West relations 171

PART III Other observations 183

8 ‘Secret Diary’ of Isaac Titsingh 185 9 Titsingh’s ‘Philosophical Discourse’ 207 x Contents Glossary 217 Notes 219 Bibliography 257 Index 263 Figures

Illustrations to the Introduction 1 Katsushika Hokusai, Untitled [the House], illustration to Asakusa Shijin, Kyo¯ka azuma asobi, monochrome woodblock print; 1799. The British Museum 8 2 (a and b) Anon., ‘Funeral Process of the Governor of Nagasaki’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 18 3 Anon., ‘Funeral Process of a Senior Official’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 19 4 Translators’ signatures, from Motoki Einoshin (Ryo¯ei) (ed.), Shozasshoshu¯, handwritten manuscript; 1795. Kobe City Museum 22 5 Isaac Titsingh, New Year’s Wishes, handwritten manuscript; 1780, 1782 or 1783. Kobe City Museum 24 6 Morishima Chu¯ryo¯, ‘Gun-trap’, from his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, monochrome printed book; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library 25 7 Isaac Titsingh (transcribed), illustration to his, Description of Sticking with the Needle and of Burning Moxa in Several Complaints, handwritten manuscript; undated. Manchester: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester 26 8 Anon., ‘House of the Chief of the Dutch Company’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 28 9 Hitotsuyanagi Kagen, Untitled [Ko¯saku’s Dutch Rooms], from Tachibana Nankei, Hokuso¯ sadan, monochrome printed book; 1825. Tokyo: National Diet Library 28 10 Shiba Ko¯kan, Yoshiho Koosak [Yoshio Ko¯saku], ink on paper; 1788. Private Collection 30 11 Anon. (Morishima Chu¯ryo¯?), ‘Human Movements’, from his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, monochrome printed book illustration; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library 31 xii Figures 12 Kutsuki Masatsuna, Signature and seal, from a handwritten list of Japanese coinage types sent to Titsingh, 1786. Manchester: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester 34 13 Nicolas Sanson, Atlas nouveau, monochrome printed title page; 1692. Ex-collection Titsingh and Kutsuki. Kanazawa: Ishikawa Prefectural Library 35 14 Anon., from Kutsuki Masatsuna, Seiyo¯ zenpu, monochrome woodblock book illustration; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library 36 15 Anon., from G. W. Knorr, Délice des yeux et de l’esprit: collection des différentes espèces de coquillages, vol. 1, hand-coloured copperplate book illustration; 1764–5. Ex-collection Titsingh and Kutsuki. Oita: Oita Prefectural Library 37 16 Anon., from Matsura Kiyoshi (Seizan), Kasshi yawa, ink on paper; late nineteenth century. Private Collection 41 17 Anon. (illus.), Isaac Titsingh (inscript.), ink and colour on paper; 1782. Hirado: Matsura Shiryo¯kan 42 18 Anon. (trad. attrib. wife of Ogino Gengai), ‘Pomegranate’, page from Taishu¯-en so¯moku-fu, ink and colour on paper; 2 vols, 1786. Manchester: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester 43 19 Anon., from Ehon kaname ishi, monochrome woodblock-printed book illustration; 1782. Private Collection 45 20 (a and b) Duché de Vancy or Prévost the Younger (Blondelle, sculp.), ‘Japanese Boat’, pages from J. C. de la Pérouse (anon., trans.), Voyage Around the World, monochrome copperplate book illustrations; 1798. London: The British Library 50 21 Anon. (Morishima Chu¯ryo¯?), ‘Luftschip’, from his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, monochrome printed book illustration; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library 54 22 Anon., from André van Braam Houckgeest, An Authentic Account of the Dutch Embassy to the Court of the Emperor of China, copperplate book illustration; 1798. London: The British Library 59

Illustrations to the Text (Only those illustrations pertaining to the sections included in this edition are reproduced)

23 Anon., ‘Residence of the Djogoun at Yedo [the shogun in Edo]’, frontispiece to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 177 24 Anon., ‘Earthquake of the Mountain of Asamayama, in the Province of Sinano [Shinano]’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 178 Figures xiii 25 Anon., ‘Earthquake, Volcanic Eruption, & Inundation in the Province of Simahara [Shimabara]’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 179 26 Anon., ‘Plan of the Dutch Factory in the Island of Desima at Nangasaki [ in Nagasaki]’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 180 27 Anon., ‘The Chinese Factory in the Street of Teng-chan at Nangasaki [To¯jin in Nagasaki], Founded in 1688’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd 181

Acknowledgements

This book has been made possible through the generosity of several individuals and institutions. The Introduction and much of the text were prepared while I was visiting professor at Heidelberg University, Germany. I would like to thank Lothar Ledderose for the invitation, and Doris Croissant, Melanie Trede and Alexander Hofmann for making my stay so interesting and rewarding. David McKay provided the translation of Titsingh’s ‘Philosophical Discourse’, and permitted me to publish it here; Cynthia Viallé permitted me to reproduce (with minor adaptations) her previously published translation of Titsingh’s ‘Secret Diary’, and Leonard Blussé her series editor concurred. I thank them all. The Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SIAJAC), offered financial assistance both at the beginning and end stages of the project, for which I thank them. The staff of Special Collections in the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) showed much forbearance in the face of my repeated requests. Titus Boeder and Maggs Brothers, Ltd. generously allowed me to photograph their copy of Titsingh’s Illustrations of Japan, and Glenn Ratcliffe saved the day with the photography. Editorial assistance was provided by Nicholas Sikorsky and Lucy Watts. Toby Screech untangled many problems of the for me, and Kobayashi Fumiko likewise with the verses cited by Titsingh. As ever, Zoo Murayama has tolerated the process from first to last, and assisted with numerous observations and ideas of his own. My work on Titsingh would not have been possible without the scholarship of Frank Lequin.

Introduction

During the five years in which he came and went from Japan, Isaac Titsingh conceived in his mind a monumental project. He was already leading an exemplary career in the (known by its acronym as the VOC), and would later rise to its summit; but this project was to be his real life’s work. The idea that had generated in Japan continued to be his obsession ever after, as he thought about it, collected data for it, translated and wrote for it, for the remainder of his days. Titsingh had decided to do nothing less than compile a compendium to lay before the reader all there was to know about the shogun’s realm. Such a work was, he felt, crucial, given the importance of the Japanese states, the indus- triousness and creativity of their people, the widespread European and American sense that this was a country that ought to be known about, and, on the other hand, the paucity of material fit to give proper understanding. Titsingh would provide the key to all Japan. At this time, among European ships, Japan admitted only VOC vessels, and then only at Nagasaki. Titsingh split his time between that port and Batavia (modern ), capital of the Dutch East Indies, where the VOC’s overseas operations were headquartered. Such a commute took six weeks’ sailing. Titsingh first went to Japan in 1779 to run the VOC trading station, or factory, as its chief negotiant and officer, and he spent three extended periods there, cumulatively forty-four months, before leaving for good in 1784. Titsingh’s length of residence in Japan was far from unprecedented; indeed many outlasted him. On first arrival, for example, he met a German, Albertus Domberg, already six years into a continuous eleven-year stay.1 What set Titsingh apart from such mercantile old hands was that he intended to become an authority on the country. Among those who professed to do this, his stay was the most protracted. Certainly, none who turned author resided in Japan for so long. Titsingh was a man of considerable training as well as aspiration. He held doctorates in law and medicine from the University of Leiden, the bastion of learning in the Republic of the United Provinces (aka Holland). He has been termed the most learned Hollander to visit Japan in this early-modern, or Edo Period, that is, the last period of shogunal rule (1603–1868).2 As Titsingh’s first English editor commented, here was a man whose faculties were ‘not wholly under the dominion of the plodding spirit of commerce’.3 It is important not to forget that for all his talents, Titsingh went East, 2 Introduction as all did, to get rich; it was only after he had made his fortune that he returned to Europe, finally, in 1796, to write his book. Titsingh’s project was not just to compile a monumental work. He also hoped to make it available to all by publishing it simultaneously in the three European languages he regarded as crucial: Dutch, his native tongue and lingua franca – though only just – of East-Asian trade; French, the language of the philosophes and the Revolution; and English, the language of modern science. Titsingh’s book was to be in two parts. The first would be a full history of Japan, from the beginning of recorded history (then thought to be 660 BC) to the present; this would comprise biographies of the dairis (titular sovereigns, today referred to as ‘emperors of Japan’), followed by longer biographies of the actual rulers of the present dynasty, that is, the shoguns of the Tokugawa family (whom Europeans then called the ‘emperors of Japan’, the dairis generally considered to be a kind of Japanese pope).4 This first section would end with an account of the history of Japanese contacts with Europeans, which had begun with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 and continued with the coming of the Dutch in 1600. After the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1636, the Dutch persisted alone until Titsingh’s day.5 The book’s second section would be about the human condition. It would open with an essay entitled ‘The Nature of the Japanese People’, and go on to discuss core elements in a person’s life cycle – marriage and funeral (birth being little celebrated in Buddhism) – then expand into a series of discursive essays on matters of special regard, such as food and drink (soya, sake, etc.), the perennially fascinating matter of ritual suicide (seppuku), poetic exchanges (which Titsingh correctly identified as a vital social lubricant), and on and on in a potentially limitless sequence of topics that he never fully demarcated. The book would end with a discussion of the quasi-Japanese periphery of (modern ¯), inhabited by a distinct ethnic group, the Ainu, more Siberian than Japanese. This vast and totalising work would be called simply, in the three languages, ‘A Description of Japan’.6 There was one further feature of the project, and perhaps this is its most remarkable. The book would not be made up of texts written by Titsingh, but only of his translations from Japanese sources. It was this, Titsingh believed, that would give his publication the qualitative edge over all other works on Japan, of which there were already several, though which seldom extended beyond travellers’ tales (albeit often gripping ones).7 On his return to Europe, Titsingh encountered a new book, just published, which he had, above all, to surpass. This was by Carl Peter Thunberg, a noted physician and botanist, who had been in Nagasaki three years before Titsingh, and was now a professor at Upsala (modern Uppsala), in Sweden, where he had succeeded to the great Linnaeus. Thunberg was regarded as one of Europe’s leading scientific scholars.8 He had gone beyond the standard travel-diary format; indeed, he decried the way that offerings of ‘more ridiculous and intrepid narratives than useful information’ were allowed to ‘intrude upon the public’. But Thunberg spoke little Japanese and read next to none. It was in the handling of original sources that Titsingh would stake his claim to superiority. Introduction 3 This concern to allow the Other to speak for itself, rather than to be spoken for, was novel, and remains one of the most innovative and impressive aspects of Titsingh’s work. He was emphatic, ‘deem[ing] it preferable’ to present the Japanese ‘in their own dress’, with unaltered translations most ‘congenial with the purpose’, adding ‘nothing of my own’.9 Of course, a translator is always a mediator, but Titsingh sought to silence his voice as much as possible. What follows is, accordingly, a sequence of translations from Japanese sources, made by Titsingh over a period of decades, from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. Some of his sources remain common today and continue to form part of the historical narrative; others are exceptionally scarce. But Titsingh’s project failed. How could it have succeeded? Once he left Japan, even though he took with him a good library, he had insufficient access to texts, and more crucially, to assistance and advice. He continued to encounter Chinese, and sometimes Japanese speakers while in Asia (the former were useful as his sources were often written in pseudo-Chinese, or , which functioned in Japan as did in Europe); but this ended when he returned to Europe. It should be added that although Titsingh never contradicted those who expressed wide-eyed admiration for his language proficiency, considerable doubt remains as to the level of his competence. In asserting that he learned Japanese in two years (which he reported he had done), Titsingh exposed himself to the charge that he could not have learned it very thoroughly.10 Even allowing for total immersion and a degree of genius, this was just not enough time. In all likelihood, Titsingh’s skills were not up to the ambitiousness of his project, and once he left his guides behind, he became unstuck. This accounts for repeated prolongations of the translating and editing stages. When Titsingh died in 1812, he had virtually nothing in print.11 His peripatetic lifestyle had taken him to Paris. Two French scholar friends, Jean-Pierre-Abel Rémusat and his younger colleague Heinrich Julius von Klaproth, both of whom read Chinese and the latter also Japanese, and who will be introduced more fully below, determined to sort out the morass of Titsingh’s papers, and publish what they could, posthumously. They saw through to press the French version of Titsingh’s manuscript, though it took them nearly a decade. This Rémusat-Klaproth edition appeared in 1820, under a more limiting title than Titsingh had hoped for, as Mémoires et anecdotes sur la dynastie régnante des djogouns (Memoirs and anecdotes on the reigning dynasty of shoguns). The publication was a success. This prompted a move to put the other language manuscripts out, and Titsingh’s English version was inspected. Owing to deficiencies of style and idiom, it was rejected, but a new translation was made from the French, by Frederick Shoberl, a journalist and well-known introducer of French authors to the English-reading public. Titsingh’s English manuscript was published the following year, under an expanded, though not entirely comprehensible title, as Illustrations of Japan; it bore the subtitle, ‘Private Memoirs and Anecdotes of the Reigning Dynasty of the Djogouns, or Sovereigns of Japan’, although in the body of the text this was altered to ‘Secret Memoirs’, which is retained here as the title of the present edition. Titsingh’s Dutch manuscripts could not be found, so a Dutch translation was made from the English translation, and published in 1824–5.12 4 Introduction For all the lingering questions of accuracy, this edition has been made in the belief that there is much to learn from what Titsingh wrote, both for the history of Japan and also for other histories – of travel, medicine, the transmission of Enlightenment thought, colonisation and trade. The whole Illustrations of Japan, however, is not given here: excised are parts that have become blatantly redundant. Selections from Titsingh’s history sections form Part I of this edition, and from the essay sections form Part II. Part III brings together two further pieces of Titsingh’s writing, not envisaged as constituents of his magnum opus, but important for grasping the totality of his life and projects: the first is his ‘Philosophical Discourse’, produced for the benefit of a friend, Goto¯ Sho¯zaemon, written in Dutch, and here published in English for the first time; the second is Titsingh’s ‘Secret Diary’, kept during his longest period of residence in Japan, to parallel the official log, or Dagregister (Daily register), that all factory chiefs were required to keep.13 The Discourse is important evidence for the spread of speculative eighteenth- century ideas from Europe to Japan, while the Diary reveals many of the covert interpersonal workings in which Titsingh was engaged, and without which he would not have acquired Japanese at all, nor gathered the materials for his book, nor made his fortune. This Introduction assesses Titsingh’s life, ideas and interactions, and discusses the formulation and history of his intended book. Additional introductions are given in the form of a preface to the various sections below, as required.

Life before Japan The life of Isaac Titsingh has been told before, though not for eighty years in English and never comprehensively. One full biography exists in Dutch, but based on Western-language sources; most of what is advanced below is previously unknown.14 The Titsingh family was originally from Hessen, in Germany, but they had long been integrated into ’s elite.15 They distinguished themselves over several generations in the two areas in which the United Provinces really shone: the arts of the sea and of medicine, sometimes combining the two. Titsingh’s grand- father, also Isaac, had been First Surgeon to the Admiralty. His eldest son, Albertus, Titsingh’s father, was a celebrated physician, known particularly for his develop- ment of obstetrics, and also sometime head of the Guild of Surgeons. Grandfather Isaac’s brother, Abraham, had also been head of the city’s Guild of Surgeons, and had three sons, Guilelmus and Adriaan, who had joined the VOC and risen high, and Nicolaas, who had become a surgeon. Of Titsingh’s own generation, Gerard, Nicholaas’s son, was a VOC physician, for a time based in Batavia. On the distaff side, of his mother, Catharina Bitter (second of Albertus’s three sequential wives), less is known, but she was of solid bourgeois stock. The Titsinghs inhabited a large house on the Herengracht. This was all impressive by any standards. Naturally enough, when Titsingh entered university, he studied medicine, but he also took law and it was in that field that he published his Latin thesis (a requirement to receive the doctorate), in 1765, De jure jurando in litem (On the Introduction 5 swearing of oaths in lawsuits). Thereupon, he joined the VOC and sailed to Batavia, departing Amsterdam’s sea road island, the Texel, in the Huis ten Spijk, that very summer. Doctors of law sometimes joined the VOC, but they generally remained as functionaries at home; all ships and overseas factories required physicians, but most had barber-surgeons. In both regards, Titsingh was tremendously over- qualified. He sailed as a regular trader, though family contacts ensured he was pegged at a high starting point, as under-merchant (onderkoopman). The Huis ten Spijk stopped for a month at the Dutch colony on the Cape, as was normal, before sailing on again, and arriving at Batavia in early 1766. Titsingh worked in a series of posts over the years, mostly associated with the fort’s magazine. He rose through the hierarchy, and after five years had become a standard-bearer of the Batavian state guard; four years later he was raised to lieutenant and the following year to captain-lieutenant. These were ceremonial titles, for Titsingh was never a military officer, but in the small and prickly city of Batavia, with its wigs, harpsichord concerts and transplanted European mores, they conferred prestige. Titsingh’s break came after three further years. He was to take it upon himself to write to the VOC’s governing council in Amsterdam, the famous Gentlemen XVII, to suggest that in future factory chiefs might be selected on the basis of edu- cational level, not just business acumen. The Gentlemen replied, in suitable lofty mode, that this was ‘easier said than done’, since they had the impression that Asian people understood ‘sacrifice to Mercury, but never to Pallas’. But recog- nising talent, and perhaps because he had just become a Freemason, the VOC raised Titsingh to upper-merchant (opperkoopman), and then nominated him to be the next chief (opperhooft) of the Japan factory, to sail thither in spring 1779.16 This would be a one-year posting since, by order of the shogunate, chiefs could not reside for longer. Notwithstanding this, there was scope for money-making, as the chief was permitted a sizeable trunk of private goods, and he alone was not subject to a body-search on arrival (a privilege chiefs much abused). In most of the Tokugawa bureaucracy’s sensitive or trust-based posts, two nominees alternated tenure annually, and the shogunate accepted that factory chiefs could do the same, such that Titsingh would return to Batavia the following season, but go back to Japan again the next, repeatedly. The VOC allowed its Japan chiefs a flexible number of these leapfrogging postings, generally between three and five, before requiring them to hand on to the next lucky individual. One of the incumbent alternating chiefs, Hendrik Duurkoop, had died en route to Japan, on the way to his second period in office, the previous year, which created an unexpected opening.

Nagasaki and Edo On Titsingh’s arrival, the Dutch had been in Japan for approaching two centuries and had been alone among Europeans in Nagasaki for nearly 150 years, since the explusion of Iberians and voluntary departure of the English. They had first arrived accidentally, as a disparate groups of merchants, in 1600, but two years later, the VOC had been created and received a monopoly on the import of Asian 6 Introduction commodities to the United Provinces, news of which reached Japan in 1609. The Dutch (and briefly the English) had used factories on the island of Hirado, just off the coast of Kyushu, in the south-west, easily reachable from Java. However, in 1639, the VOC was relocated to Nagasaki, where they took over the old Portuguese base of Dejima, a tiny man-made island a few metres into the bay. As an island, Dejima was useful in protecting the valuable goods from fire or theft. But it could seem prison-like, especially as VOC staff were not always allowed to leave it. The VOC had once sent many ships to Japan, but in the early eighteenth century the quota was fixed at two. This was contested during Titsingh’s tenure because the fast depletion of Japan’s only bulk export – copper (other than to obtain which the VOC saw no merit in coming to Japan, though they also bought camphorwood) – could not justify such high tonnage. The VOC wanted to scale back even further. Increasing difficulty in obtaining exportable copper was a serious dilemma for the Japanese, since they wanted the VOC to remain, but Titsingh misinterpreted it as a ruse by the town’s shogunal plenipotentiary, the governor of Nagasaki (Nagasaki bugyo¯), to raise prices by cramping supply, and he threatened a pull-out. The VOC were the only Europeans, but Chinese vessels entered Nagasaki, and in greater numbers, though their ships were smaller. A Chinese community in town had its own island store, and a stockaded residential area onshore (they were too many to live on the island). During Titsingh’s tenure as factory chief, the Chinese merchants also intermittently threatened to cut their losses and run.17 Every year, the two VOC ships would leave Batavia in May and arrive in Nagasaki at the beginning of August. There would be intensive negotiations over the sale and purchase of goods. The first day of the eighth lunar month (mid- September), was the Japanese hassaku, or gift-giving day, known to the Dutch as the ‘Nagasaki recognition’, and the VOC observed the protocols, handing out newly imported ‘rarities’ to those in positions of power. In late summer was the Kuchi festival at Nagasaki’s Suwa Shrine, which the Europeans viewed from stands erected for the purpose. The full process of unloading and reloading would take until early November, and during this period the outgoing factory chief would remain in charge. Since the governorate of Nagasaki was one of the shogunate’s alternating posts, the person who had sat out the previous year in the shogunal capital, Edo (modern Tokyo), would now arrive, the two governors would tour the ships and visit Dejima, and the one who had just completed his year in Nagasaki would return to Edo. The out-going chief handed over control of the factory about a fortnight later, and sailed away with the departing ships by mid-November. Left behind was a skeleton group of a dozen Europeans and about the same number of enslaved Indonesians. It did not make for a life of great excitement. Most VOC staff took advantage of Nagasaki’s notorious red-light district, the Maruyama, whose denizens could visit the island freely and who alone among all Japanese people could overnight there.18 The Maruyama was so imprinted on European sailors’ minds that their deformation of it, ‘miriam’, had, since the early eighteenth century at least, been used as the generic term for pleasure quarters throughout Asia.19 Genuine friendships could be made in this manner, with conversations conducted in rudimentary Japanese, or more often Malay, which all spoke some- Introduction 7 what, and some spoke well. Daytime male-to-male bonds were also formed with the assorted minders and translators employed by the shognuate to manage the VOC employees and their international affairs. As the Europeans were seldom permitted to wander about town, and the Indonesians never were, the scope for encountering ‘ordinary’ Japanese people was not great. Nagasaki was a city of only 50,000-odd inhabitants, and far from the centres of power. It took about as long to get there from Edo as it did from Batavia. But by time-honoured tradition, three top members of the Dejima factory would go annually to Edo to pay their respects to the shogun and, if there was one, to his designated successor (there was none when Titsingh arrived). The chief always went on this Court Trip (hofeis), as it was known, assuming a semi-ambassadorial role. The factory scribe and normally the resident physician went too. Their stay in Edo was for three weeks, and the whole round-trip might take four months, and thus, for up to a quarter of any year, the small European posse, with a Japanese entourage of some hundred attendants, would traverse the country. This period allowed for a better degree of contact, and undercuts some modern historians’ talk of the sequestration of the VOC in Nagasaki and the ‘closure’ of Japan. To any European of enquiring bent, the court trip was a superlative occasion to view the landscape, to see a range of sights, and to interact with Japanese people of all classes. Although policed, with wandering off not condoned, the entourage lodged most nights in standard inns, and even when they did not (in major cities they had dedicated residences that were kept empty at other times), these were always centrally located. Carl Peter Thunberg, who made the trip in 1776, wrote that, ‘I have never made so pleasant a journey as this.’20 In Edo itself, the three Europeans would encounter one of the world’s largest, finest and most dangerous metropoles. Each trip was fundamentally the same. The entourage would leave Nagasaki in February, just after the lunar New Year, so as to arrive in Edo on the 1st day of the 4th month (mid-May), which was the ritual moment for putting away winter clothes and donning summer ones (or removing the wadding for people with few garments). The arrival of the Europeans was part of the pageantry of the return of warmth and the balmy reawakening of the season. The shogunate promoted the idea that this procession of people from the undeveloped ends of the earth demonstrated their righteous benevolence: the VOC came to seek instructions and do homage. It was a matter of debate as to whether these foreigners were undevel- oped or not. Some were recognised as men of learning, and, as we shall see below, Titsingh was one, as Thunberg had been before him. But all were agog at the annual procession of ‘oranda-jin’ (Oranda = Holland; jin = person), or ‘red furred people’ (ko¯mo¯-jin), bearing wonderful arrays of gifts. The VOC was mobbed in the streets. Discussing or depicting political events was forbidden, so few details survive from the Japanese side to reveal the conditions that extravagantly prevailed. One rare image appears in Katsushika Hokusai’s illustrated poetry album of 1799, on the sights of Edo, Kyo¯ka azuma asobi (Leisure time in the east told in ‘mad verse’), showing the VOC hostel, called the Nagasaki House (Nagasaki-ya) (see Figure 1).21 The scene is decently shown to avoid any charge of lese-majesty, and of all 8 Introduction

Figure 1 Katsushika Hokusai, Untitled [the Nagasaki House], illustration to Asakusa Shijin, Kyo¯ka azuma asobi, monochrome woodblock print; 1799. The British Museum. the illustrations in the book, it alone is unlabelled, allowing Hokusai and his publisher an escape route, if challenged. In practical terms, after setting out, the VOC trip as far as Shimonoseki was overland; from there they went to Sakai by water, and were then carried in Introduction 9 palanquins to the adjoining city of Osaka; this was a major conurbation ten times the size of Nagasaki. From Osaka, they went by river boat to the city known to Europeans as Miyako and to the Japanese as Kyo¯ or Keishi (though properly always , its standardised modern name), similar in size to Osaka. From Miyako, they took the To¯kaido¯, one of the world’s best-maintained highways, the 500 km to Edo. After their official audiences and other less formal meetings, the group would return the way they came, this time in more relaxed mode. Back in Miyako they would commission small quantities of lacquer be sent down to Nagasaki for export (usually privately), and would make tourist visits to temples; in Osaka they would inspect the shogunal copper monopoly (do¯za), and go to the theatre. They arrived back in Nagasaki in late May. After the court trip’s return, the chief would take back control from his deputy, and begin preparations to receive the in-coming ships. Summer and autumn would see the festivals, the unloading and loading, the various hand-overs and departures, and the sailing of the ships.

Titsingh’s Japan Upon nomination, Titsingh made his preparations and sailed to Japan, arriving in August, 1779, again using the Huis ten Spijk, skippered by Hermanus Siedenburg; the second ship was the Roodenreis, under Juriaan Ficke. Titsingh met the incumbent chief, Arend Feith, whom he would have known from Batavia; Titsingh would assume the rotation Feith had expected to have with the deceased Duurkoop. Feith was already on his fifth stint, including the double one forced on him by Duurkoop’s demise en route to take up his post, but he showed no intention of bowing out. During the time the two men were together in Nagasaki, Titsingh had access to Feith’s wealth of information, and, though he was perhaps not formally educated, Feith was a person of scientific interests; he had been instrumental in Thunberg’s securing of the botanical samples that made him famous in Europe, having been chief during the Swedish scholar’s visit too.22 The new chief had to inform his predecessor about world affairs, so that he could dictate a report for forwarding to Edo, to be archived by the shogunate. Titsingh told of fighting at Makassar between the VOC and its host country, Gowa; the place, in modern Indonesia, was important for oil export (hence ‘anti-macassar’); but beyond that, Titsingh stated, ‘peace reigns in the homeland and there is no special news’.23 Before Feith had even gone and Titsingh had taken over formal control, the new arrival threw down the gauntlet to the shogunate, delivering a strongly worded letter from Batavia. The VOC authorities were complaining of two recurrent problems: depredation of Company goods through stealing (the island location did not offer enough security) and other sharp practices, with the lax Japanese follow- up to such infringements, and insufficient provision of copper; the latter meant diminishing prices paid for imports, as all trade was done on barter, and in effect, the VOC merely swapped what they brought for a pre-agreed quantity of copper, so that unless the quota was adhered to, they could not determine how many goods to bring. In 1698, a body called the Nagasaki Office (kaisho¯ in Japanese, geldkamer 10 Introduction in Dutch) had been established, and all imports had to be sold through it, ending the system of public VOC auctions held in town. The Company was therefore over a barrel. Barring setting some of their imports aside, or making a U-turn with their ships, they had no alternative but to accept in exchange whatever amount of copper was offered by the shogunate, even if it fell short of what had been agreed. The letter Titsingh delivered was so abrupt it shocked the governors, Kuze Hirotami (about to return to Edo) and Tsuge Masakore (just arrived for his year in residence). They sent word that they ‘dare not send it’ to Edo.24 As if to prove the validity of the complaints contained in the letter, not one week later, the camphorwood being loaded aboard the Huis ten Spijk (the second commodity, which, to a degree, could compensate for the diminution of copper) was found to have been adulterated with stones. The shogunal officer in charge blithely took his countrymen’s side, arguing that the packers were required to complete nearly impossible daily allocations, so ‘adding a couple of stones helps’.25 Titsingh only allowed loading to continue after extracting a promise from Hirotami, the returning governor, that he would raise the matter in Edo. Tsuge Masakore was despised by the VOC and by the Chinese, as ‘odious’ and a ‘bad governor’, but Kuze Hirotami was liked and Titsingh called him ‘a fine fellow’ (brave); he trusted him to deal with the problem in Edo.26 The two men rotated as governors for three more years, playing the roles of good cop and bad cop. In late November, despite these hiccups, Feith handed the factory keys to Titsingh, boarded the Huis te Spijk and left. Titsingh took over the official log, making his first entry on the 29th of that month. Much of the data on Titsingh’s time in Japan derives from this source; he deliberately intended no travelogue section in his book, and so kept no records; there is, additionally, the more confessional ‘Secret Diary’, and also many extant letters. Not even a week later, on 3 December, Titsingh had to write that the Roodenrijs had sprung a leak while still in Nagasaki Bay, and as its pump was broken, it could not sail; a spare pump was found on Dejima and rapidly sent out by lighter.27 Both ships departed successfully on the 13th. Three weeks on again, just into the solar New Year, Titsingh got a lesson in Japanese protocol: the dairi, Hidehito, died, aged just 21 (his was an inbred family and all died young).28 Five days’ mourning were required, a hush assisted by an unusual 60-cm fall of snow. The dairi was given the posthumous name, Go- Momozono, and, like all Japanese rulers, is known by this (dairis’ and shoguns’ actual names were not released, and though those of the latter are casually used to today, it was not so at the time; using those of the former is still not accepted). Titsingh’s interest was piqued by finding that ‘Go-Momozono’ had no son, leaving him to wonder over the constitutional issues this would provoke (they were enormous).29 To make matters worse, just ten days later, a rumour circulated that the shogun, Tokugawa Ieharu, was dead, which would require 50 days’ mourning, but luckily this turned out to be a false alarm (note the relative importance of the two rulers).30 In early February 1780, the barge used annually to convey the court trip presents to Edo came around from Osaka where it was kept; it was laden and sent on to Introduction 11 Shimonoseki, where the three VOC officials would join it, and sail with it to Sakai.31 Titsingh now began the first of his two court trips. The factory had been without a physician since the unexpected resignation of Thunberg in 1776; moreover, the scribe, Johan Schartow, was ill. Accordingly, Titsingh travelled with the bookkeeper Ernst van Beckstein (who had also gone in lieu of a physician the previous year) and Domburg, the old Japan-hand mentioned above. Of Nagasaki’s several official Dutch translators, two always accompanied the trip, one of senior and one of junior grade, and in this case they were Namura Genjiro¯ and Narabayashi Eizaemon. The group passed through the Inland Sea to Sakai, and stopped in Osaka and Miyako without problem. They were delayed near Edo by the retinue of one of the great regional rulers (daimyo), or ‘princes’ (to use Titsingh’s term), Shimazu Shigehide, of Satsuma, who was also travelling to court. Shigehide was surely informed that the Europeans were cooling their heels behind him, for his links to the VOC were close, and would become profound. Satsuma was near to Nagasaki and, for many years, factory chiefs had relied on, and obtained, his good will. They showered Shigehide with gifts, including sugar-plums, to which he was addicted, and he built up an extraordinary collection of European items, beyond what anyone else remotely possessed.32 Shigehide had natural-history samples from faraway places, chairs, chandeliers, quantities of porcelain tableware, and unique objects such as a diamond pen for glass etching, a static-electricity generator and a glass .33 Shigehide was a bird-watcher and so they gave him rare species and he wrote an ornithological handbook in which the names appear in Latin, Chinese and Japanese.34 But Shigehide was a person of political consequence too, and his significance would be augmented dramatically the following year when Hitotsubashi Toyochiyo, the minor shogunal prince to whom he had espoused his four-year-old daughter, Tadako, was unexpectedly adopted by the shogun (who, like the old dairi, was sonless); in 1786 Toyochiyo would succeed, under the name of Tokugawa Ienari.35 To become father-in-law of the shogun promised power in the highest degree. Shigehide spoke Dutch and used the language to communicate in secret with his spies: he also had his enemies.36 On arrival in Edo, just before the VOC, arsonists lit fires near Shigehide’s lodgings, hoping to compromise him and probably also steal items from his luggage, but his guards extinguished the blazes.37 When Titsingh got to Edo, just after, he was informed of the death of Hiraga Gennai. This was a blow. Gennai was at the centre of many urban intellectual circles, and had been one of the first to argue forcefully, in the mid-eighteenth century, for Europeans and their culture to be taken seriously.38 He knew Shigehide, although differences of status would have made them unable to meet openly, especially after Gennai, a samurai, surrendered his rank to pursue academic and scientific interests. He experimented with electricity, mine-pumping, asbestos, ceramics and oil painting, and travelled to Nagasaki in 1752 and 1770–1, meeting the VOC contingent there, under chiefs Hendrik van Homoed on the first trip, and Olphert Elias then Daniel Armenault on the second. Gennai managed to meet several VOC chiefs when they came to Edo too, and, most famously, in 1762, he 12 Introduction enjoyed a drinking bout with the long-standing Jan Crans, which historians would come to identify as a turning-point in Japanese estimations of the West.39 The facts leading up to Gennai’s death have never been clarified, but it seems he murdered a student in a fit of rage, and was imprisoned. Titsingh heard that Shigehide was secretly using influence to secure his release, but the relevant governor of Edo (like Nagasaki, Edo had two, but they worked concurrently), Makino Nariyoshi, fearing a disturbance – in addition to everything else, Gennai was a wildly popular fictionalist and playwright – had Gennai poisoned in his cell. Titsingh was surely looking forward to a meeting, but instead, could only lament in his log the loss of one who, having ‘trained himself in several sciences through research and observation, and having been a great friend of the Dutchmen’, was now no more.40 Gennai’s student, Morishima Chu¯ryo¯, inherited his mantle, and will be encountered below. Another death was reported, although one that would have affected Titsingh less: the wife of Masakore, of the bad governor, who was himself in Nagasaki, had succumbed in childbirth in Edo.41 The audience with the shogun was held on 5 April. Titsingh recorded seeing ‘his imperial majesty’ standing, which, if correct, is odd, as he would be expected to sit. But the encounter would have lasted about a minute, and Titsingh’s head should have been firmly face-down on the floor. Titsingh summed up his time in Edo: ‘we were received amicably’, in contrast to ‘the usual treatment meted out in Nagasaki’.42 It is not certain whether his stay in Edo was entirely pleasant though, for he later wrote that he would ‘condemn to hell’ the Edo governor whose ‘odious behaviour destroyed my enthusiasm for making proper use of my time there’.43 On the 14th, after the normal three weeks, Titsingh, Van Beckstein, Domburg and their minders began the journey home. Back in Nagasaki, Titsingh extended condolences, not necessarily heartfelt, to Masakore, on the loss of his wife. Some weeks later, he heard of another death, and one that would have affected him deeply. This was of Goto¯ So¯zaemon, head of the Nagasaki Office, who, despite all their differences over the regime of the Office itself, Titsingh had become close to. He had not seen So¯zaemon since his return from Edo, and this he now regretted. So¯zaemon, it will be recalled, was the recipient of Titsingh’s ‘Philosophical Discourse’.44 There was routine work to attend to before the summer came. Repairs were needed on some of the VOC buildings. One warehouse was declared beyond salvage. Masakore offered the use of the two godowns kept by the governors for their own semi-legal imported rarities, but this was only, thought Titsingh (never one to give Masakore the benefit of the doubt), ‘because they are of no use to him’. At the beginning of August, Feith sailed back aboard the Mars, again captained by Siedenberg, this time accompanied by the Canaan, under Ficke. In his depo- sition for Edo, Feith reported an alliance between Spain and France against Great Britain (France was keen to reap benefits from Great Britain’s American War, and Spain hoped to seize Gibraltar); Feith noted there was a danger of war spilling into the United Provinces.45 Unloading began, with Masakore strongly complaining that ‘the rarities which have been ordered for many years’ had not been imported. Introduction 13 Quite what he was soliciting is unsure, but they must have been substantial, for in every year fine items had been brought for him (and others) often in response to requests, including ‘clocks, tinderboxes and a magnifying glass’ in 1779, and ‘clocks and other gifts’ that very year.46 Angrily, Titsingh shot back that the VOC was not in a mood to indulge, given continuing price-fixing and theft. Word of a spat between the VOC chief and the governor leaked into town, and rumour spread that Titsingh had commanded the Mars and the Canaan to unload but sail out empty, depriving Nagasaki dealers in exports of their income (a fantasy, as the ships could not sail without ballast).47 After the festivals, the reloading and the handovers, Titsingh left in early November, ending his first tenure in Japan. He remained in Batavia until the next spring, then returned, arriving in August, 1781, with Siedenburg on the Mars. They were hit by severe weather and very nearly sank. It was a mercy for both sides that the Mars got through, for in annoyance, the new VOC governor-general in Batavia, Willem Alting, authorised only a single ship for Japan that year – a high-risk strategy, since if it were lost at sea, the factory staff would be marooned, and Batavia not able to confirm what had happened until the following year’s ships had gone and come back.48 A single ship was more immediately a problem for the Japanese side, with the dealers in imports having little to sell, and tremendous knock-on effects throughout the town and its wider hinterland (copper was a shogunal commodity and its sale had little relevance to the economy of Nagasaki itself, except among hired dockers and porters). Titsingh surely approved of Alting’s strategy, if he did not actually instigate it, yet he could not but have worried about the results on the citizenry of Nagasaki, many of whom were his friends. On arrival, Titsingh stated that Spain and France were now fully at war with Great Britain; the English East India Company had seized the VOC factories on the Coromandel Coast (most importantly, Nagapattinam), and, intriguingly, that a Japanese castaway had opened a language school in St Petersburg.49 True to form, a theft then occurred, of cloves. The good governor, Kuze Hirotami, just in, fulminated at the ‘rampaging of the thieving claws of the coolies’.50 But even so, not long after this theft, another one, this time of books, was reported too. Both are useful indications of how valuable seemingly trivial items might be, not least as both thefts were of small quantities. In the case of the cloves, the Dutch caught the culprit red-handed and had him expelled from Dejima; the person who had taken the books was never found, though the volumes were eventually recovered, but ‘badly damaged’, with ‘all the prints . . . torn out’.51 In the autumn, Tsuge Masakore, the bad governor, took over and Hirotami left for Edo. The Mars left very late, for reasons unknown, on 9 December. As the Edo-bound gift-barge had to be dispatched, also for reasons unknown, unusually early, there was little time to prepare. Just after lunar New Year, 1782, the entourage set out, on Titsingh’s second court trip. The roster was normalised: a German physician, Hendrik Oberkampf, had arrived on the Mars, and Schartow was back in health. The accompanying translators were Hori Gizaburo¯, in senior post, and Nishi Keiemon, as junior. During the seaborne part of the way, foul weather delayed them and once drove them ashore at the town of Muro, where, 14 Introduction alarmingly, they saw seven vessels ‘the size of our barge’ wrecked. However, the forced landing gave them a chance to see the town, to which, Titsingh noted, ‘no Dutchman had been for a long time’. The precedent referred to was in 1691, when the VOC group had included Engelbert Kaempfer, also German, who recorded his experiences in an epoch-making book, The History of Japan, first published in 1727 in English, but probably known to Titsingh in the French translation of 1729, or perhaps the Dutch one of 1733 (it did not have a German edition until 1779).52 Kaempfer, Thunberg and Titsingh were to be the trio of authors by which Japan was reintroduced to the West, after erasure of memories of the Iberian Catholics. Titsingh was as yet unaware that Thunberg was labouring over a manuscript in Sweden, but he knew Kaempfer well enough, and on this second court trip he cited Kaempfer often, comparing their experiences en route (which raises the question of why he had not done so on his first trip; perhaps he had obtained his copy only when back in Batavia, or, more prosaically, had left it behind in Nagasaki before).53 Either way, Titsingh was careless in his citation of the precedent for a stop in Muro, and such sloppiness will soon be recognised as characteristic of him: Titsingh professed to find Muro in ‘very bad shape’, which stood ‘in contrast to the description in Kaempfer’ but actually Kaempfer called Muro ‘nasty’ and its inhabitants ‘mean’.54 In Edo, Titsingh had his official audience with the shogun, again said to be ‘clearly standing’; since an heir-apparent had now been nominated (Shigehide’s daughter’s husband-to-be, Toyochiyo/Ienari), Titsingh was received by him too. They spent about three weeks in Edo, as normal, and when leaving, stopped by Shigehide’s palace, at the daimyo’s request, ‘where his lordship, his family, and several noble women had assembled’, wrote Titsingh.55 They arrived back in Nagasaki after an absence of nearly three months. Summer came around and they waited for ships, or even a ship. Nothing came. Titsingh had foreseen as much, not because of Alting’s pique, but because the United Provinces had been sucked into war, on the Franco-Spanish aide, against Great Britain. This is known as the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War; it had begun in 1780, lasted four years, and now hit the furthest reaches of the Dutch maritime empire. In South-East Asia, the British were strong and able to blockade Batavia, meaning there could be no sailings to Japan. By the end of August, governor Masakore was commanding a trailing through the Nagasaki archives to see if ever before vessels had arrived so late.56 He pointed out that ‘although the Dutch had waged war often in former times, their ships had never failed to sail to Japan’. Knowing he was unpopular, he suspected the tables were being turned on him and the ship(s) deliberately withheld. Titsingh wrote Masakore a memo laying the blame for non- arrival entirely at the door of the Japanese, not even mentioning the British, and arguing that so many years of coming ‘without any compensation’, meant cessation of trade with Japan was the only logical recourse for the VOC. Titsingh was seeking to shift the severe matter of the war to the VOC’s ultimate advantage; he felt compelled, he said, to write his (fraudulent) memo, because it was ‘irresponsible to remain silent’ now that ‘trade has virtually petered out’.57 Then a major theft occurred, of cloth. A boy confessed and Titsingh had him Introduction 15 punished, with ‘screws on both legs . . . for the holes in the pillory were too large for his feet’. Masakore suggested torture, but Titsingh, to his credit, refused, on the grounds that the boy had fully confessed and named accomplices too; these were arrested, but they refused to confess, perhaps because they had been falsely accused, so Masakore suggested torture, and this time Titsingh agreed. Such brutal sanctions were very rare and not appreciated in town. Titsingh was blamed for not letting the matter rest quietly, as most chiefs did, for the sake of goodwill and because shogunal punishments were so disproportionate. The town ‘was buzzing’, Titsingh wrote, that the thieves had only stolen to feed their families. But becoming high-minded, Titsingh wrote in his log, ‘I considered it my solemn duty to insist on justice.’ Two enslaved Indonesians were then implicated, so Titsingh sent them to Masakore for torture, as the factory lacked ‘the required persons and appliances’; one of these men, Sjako, died the following year, perhaps due to the rigours he had suffered, and Titsingh ordered his corpse to be ‘handed over to the Japanese, wrapped in a piece of sailcloth filled with sand’ and thrown into the sea.58 In the meantime, Nagasaki’s finances were crippled. Some 300 longshoremen had to take up other work, and in desperation committed crimes, until, Titsingh noted, ‘the prisons of the city are getting fuller and fuller by the day’.59 Masakore was still unwilling to believe that no ship would come, and ordered the citizens to visit their local temples and pray for three full days for an eventual safe arrival. Wishful thinking reigned, and ‘every day false tidings of the arrival of the ships’ were ‘strewn around the city’.60 Masakore grew fearful for his own position: no ship meant no graft for him to dispense when back in Edo. He summoned the translators, though it was nothing to do with them, deeply humiliating them by making them appear before him without their swords, and throwing intemperate and disdainful words at them, before sending them away in high choler. When autumn arrived, despite no ships having come, the governors changed again, and Hirotami returned. Perhaps in embarrassment, they skipped the normal formality of inspection of the factory. Just before Masakore quit town, his family estates, in the region of Osaka, were utterly demolished by hurricanes, and Titsingh reported, ‘all Japanese are rejoicing at his misfortune’.61 Back in Edo, Masakore was told his time as Nagasaki governor was over, but still with powerful friends, he was allowed the face-saving measure given most Nagasaki governors regarded as failures, and was appointed Magistrate of Works at Edo Castle (sakuji buygo¯), technically a promotion as it carried a higher stipend, but far less lucrative – under normal trading circumstances at least.62 Titsingh would, therefore, be required to stay on for another twelve months – assuming ships came the following summer, or if they did not, he and his staff were cut off indefinitely. There was absolutely nothing to do. Titsingh used his time to improve his language, embark on serious collecting of data, and begin some translations: the date of 1782 appears in certain places in his manuscript (as, though, does 1784) denoting the present time. The court trip was cancelled. Titsingh now had his first protracted contact with the good governor Hirotami, who had been in Edo during his two previous stints as factory chief. They entered into ‘direct and 16 Introduction open contact’, Titsingh claimed, of a kind never before enjoyed by a chief and a governor; not always able to meet in person, they used a go-between, Namura Naosaburo¯, a translator, who, thanks to his job, had unproblematic access to both the VOC island and the governor’s mansion, and, of course, spoke both lan- guages.63 The Hirotami–Titsingh conversation went on uninterrupted for a full year, and it forms much of the stuff of the ‘Secret Diary’. Hirotami is an interesting figure and some space must be given to him. Although from a relatively lowly family (his hereditary stipend was just 500 koku, while the average governor would have about 3,000), but had become close to , daimyo of Sagara, who, in turn, was close to the shogun, Tokugawa Ieharu, and who had been nominated his ‘favourite’ (an official post, soba yo¯nin). Okitsugu controlled all that happened in the central shogunal bureaucracy, and he must have sanctioned the special démarches Hirotami made with Titsingh, perhaps having been finally made aware of Masakore’s misconduct in Nagasaki, and its putative consequences.64 Okitsugu’s enthusiasm for Europe is well attested. In 1775, he had sent his secretary for a round of off-the-record discussions with the VOC in Edo on their court trip, under chief Daniel Armenault.65 The shogun, Tokugawa Ieharu, already long in office, was a despised individual. He was thought by all, according to Jan Crans, to be ‘a lazy, lustful, stupid man’.66 His position was largely ceremonial and low levels of competence need not have caused severe disjunctions; so more at issue was the character of Tanuma Okitsugu. Titsingh refers to him several times in his book, using Okitsugu’s title Tonomo-no-kami, and generally approvingly. But not all thought so. Okitsugu had joined the shogunal upper house of fifteen Elders (ro¯ju¯), in 1772, gaining the power to steer both it, and the lower house of twelve oxymoronically labelled Young Elders (waka-doshiyori) – these two groups were called by Titsingh the Ordinary and Extraordinary ministers of state. Okitsugu’s policy of liberalisation of trade, including international, stood to help the Company, for all that the depletion of copper was an inescapable fact. When the populace of Nagasaki, who knew little of the central shogunal power brokers, was told that Masakore would not return, hopes rose that there might be a complete rethink of trade, and that the VOC might flourish in Japan and carry the town with it. In June 1783, all waited expectantly for ships. By mid-August there was panic. It was a huge relief when, on the 26th, a vessel was spotted, and shortly after the Trompenburg sailed into port, skippered by Joachin Edlefs. Titsingh expected to find Feith aboard, but he had died in the intervening period. The arriving chief-designate was Caspar Romberg, whom Titsingh had worked with at the Nagasaki factory in 1779–80, when Romberg had served there in a lower capacity. Feith’s estate on the island was inventoried, and it confirms him as a man of intel- lectual curiosity: found in his trunks were several items for scientific investigation and demonstration, such as a planetarium and a static-electricity generator.67 The Trompenburg was a large vessel, 1,150 tons, and with a crew of 128, perhaps to compensate for no second vessel being dispatched that year also.68 The Trompenburg itself had got through by the skin of its teeth, not only because Introduction 17 of the continuing war, but because a terrible storm had hit it, and ‘all the seams opened’, which required so many carpenters that Hirotami unprecedentedly summoned them in from neighbouring towns (the shogunate did not like general carpenters working on the ships, in case they tried steal goods, or worse, copied its construction).69 Romberg submitted his report: Spain, France and Great Britain were all at war, but, he untruthfully added, the United Provinces, though fearing embroilment, was not yet involved; Japanese was still being taught in Russia.70 Always the VOC filtered out what it was not in their interest for the shogunate to know, though Edo sometimes found out such matters via the Chinese. Hirotami appended a secret rider to Romberg’s report before it went to Edo, detailing his own inter- pretation of the reasons for the repeated non-arrival of expected VOC ships, to wit (dissipating any whif of error on the part of the magistracy), war.71 The Trompenburg was unloaded and reloaded. Hirotami’s replacement arrived. Masakore had been relieved, and Tsuchiya Morinao, formerly governor of Osaka, was installed. He and Hirotami toured the ship and visited Dejima, before the latter returned to Edo, and, on 6 November, Titsingh sailed for Batavia ending his second incumbency. Romberg’s first few months went smoothly enough. Next spring, he made the court trip with Oberkampf and a new scribe, Petrus Chassé. They returned in late May to find the new governor, Morinao, seriously ill. He died shortly after, and Romberg and his staff had an unusual and exciting opportunity to learn about elite Japanese funerals. Titsingh missed it, although in 1781 he had been able to view, through binoculars, the body of a less senior Nagasaki official, Takagi Sakuemon, buried ‘by an entourage of priests amid thousands of onlookers’, and to acquire a painting of it.72 Titsingh also managed to obtain a painting of Morinao’s cortege. Both scrolls were used (in reverse order) as pull-out illustrations to his book’s section on funerals (see Figures 2 and 3).73 An acting-governor was hurriedly summoned, Toda Tamitake, on the point of retirement as governor of Sado, not a lofty post, and receiving this special political favour on account of something owed him by powerful forces in the shogunate.74 In August 1784, Titsingh came back for his third round as factory chief. For the first time in four years there was a full complement of ships – or there should have been, as two had sailed from Batavia. Titsingh’s vessel, the Ouwerkerk, got through, severely damaged, but the sister ship, the Vrouwe Everhardina sank, killing all aboard (including Schartow, who had briefly relocated to Batavia).75 Titsingh was quick to point out that even if only one had come, two ships had been sent, which was, he said, thanks to the ‘forceful solicitations’ he had made to the governor-general. The Nagasaki governorate only had his word for this, and anyway, good intentions were not enough. There was ‘general despondency’ in town.76 Before it could be unloaded, the Ouwerkerk snapped its anchor cable, listed and drifted dangerously towards the shore, ruining the cargo, most of which was only fit for dumping. Titsingh offered his report: the VOC was still fighting in Gowa, and worse, they were now in deep crisis in India, not having been able to take back the factories 18 Introduction

(a)

(b)

Figure 2 (a and b) Anon., ‘Funeral Process of the Governor of Nagasaki’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd.

captured by the British; procurement there was becoming impossible; Titsingh still hedged on the Anglo-Dutch war, claiming only that the war between Spain, France and Great Britain looked likely to engulf the United Provinces, but ‘though the whole country is in a state of unrest, at present peace is maintained’. Titsingh would have left Batavia shortly before news arrived there that peace had actually been concluded, nearly a year before in September, 1783, at the Treaty of Paris (as part of which, Great Britain had recognised the USA).77 Three stints were about enough for most chiefs, although Feith had kept coming back for more. Despite his pro-Japanese stance, Titsingh had grown vexed with the intransigence of the shogunal bureaucracy, even under Tanuma Okitsugu when it arguably reached its most benign manifestation. The ‘direct and open’ contacts had not yielded the fruit expected in terms of an expansion of trade. Titsingh did not complete his third incumbency, but departed that same autumn with the Ouwerkerk. There was a precedent for this truncation: Herbert Vermeulen, had Introduction 19

Figure 3 Anon., ‘Funeral Process of a Senior Official’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd. stayed from only summer to autumn in 1759.78 Titsingh now handed control back to Romberg, who would thus be chief for two years in succession. Titsingh and the acting-governor, Toda Tamitake, tacitly agreed to the charade that Titsingh had paralysed his arm, making him unable to do springtime homage to the shogun and requiring him to surrender to one who could, extenuating his premature departure.79 Titsingh proposed that, with shipping so haphazard, they formalise a lessening of sailings to two ships then one, in alternate years; this, he noted, ‘was not to their liking’.80 The matter was left unresolved. In 1783, before Titsingh had returned for this third time, after over seven years as governor, Hirotami had been rewarded with elevation to shogunal Minister of Finance (kanjo¯ bugyo¯), one of the top posts in government, and so sensitive it was held by four incumbents.81 The VOC fondly convinced themselves he might be reappointed to Nagasaki, but that could never be.82 Thus, yet another new governor now arrived, Tsuchiya Masanobu, previously governor of Miyako (kyo¯to machi bugyo¯).83 Confusingly, he shares a family name with his predecessor. In the brief interlude when he met Masanobu, Titsingh found him ‘very friendly’. Titsingh sailed out in the Ouwerkerk for the last time on the final day of November 1784. With peace concluded with Great Britain, Romberg was optimistic, but nevertheless, the next summer, in 1785, Batavia sent only one ship again, the Schelde. It brought a new chief, who leapfrogged with Romberg for the rest of the decade, Johan van Reede tot de Parkeler, a Dutch baron and the most elite European ever to work on Dejima.84 Precisely why Titsingh, despite his love of Japan, did not fulfil his third incumbency, much less engage for a fourth, will be elucidated below.

Titsingh and the Japanese scholars: in Nagasaki The happier moments, while Titsingh had high hopes, coincided with the non- arrival of the ships in summer 1782, which allowed him to spend most time in and around the factory, and in communication with Hirotami. The town of Nagasaki was under direct shogunal rule and had no daimyo, so it was in many ways free, as well as international. The Nagasaki Office had been established to prevent VOC 20 Introduction officials building links to Japanese individuals, but was successful only up to a point. It was through friendship links that the Europeans made their fortunes. Titsingh reported one could gain an extra 60 per cent on one’s private trade by establishing relations of trust with buyers in town. The best items to bring, he wrote in a letter to a successor, were value-added, such as glasses for wine and beer or carafes with gilded edges, ideally of crystal.85 He recommended anyone with ‘certain articles that he hopes to smuggle’, to carry ‘the best of their sort, but small in size’.86 Titsingh enjoined keeping them ‘in a secret places onboard’, for ‘initially he must be careful not to trust any Japanese, until he finds out who has earned it’.87 Much that went on in Nagasaki was extra-legal, if not downright felonious, and it was crucial to distinguish friend from informer. An instructive lesson in this respect is someone who played his cards wrong. Despite his long residence in Japan and ability to speak Japanese, Albertus Domberg was double-crossed and expelled. The story goes like this: Domburg had caught a labourer stealing from the VOC stores, and struck him, whereupon the man’s friends claimed he had been seriously injured, though physician Oberkampf could find nothing wrong; the translator Narabayashi Eizaemon, mentioned above, who used thieving networks intensively and detested Domberg precisely because his language skills threatened the translators’ prerogatives, filed false report; Domburg was ordered to leave on the next ship. Titsingh noted he was in ‘utter despair’ because he was ‘on his way to making his fortune’. In sum, it was impor- tant to stay on the good side of Japanese officials, since their ‘enmity and revenge’ could be lethal. Titsingh wrote a letter of recommendation for Domburg, to secure him a job wherever he took himself next.88 Titsingh had gone to sea to get rich, but he also had his book project in mind, and he needed a special caste of Japanese associate, not merely the money-oriented kind. His growing command of Japanese would not necessarily have threatened the translators, for he was trying to read quite different sorts of text from the covert missives that went about among so many others. The translators were his principal Japanese human contacts, and he treated them, in the main, with care; he needed them to help with his sources. The translators were part of the large mechanism of the governerate, and housed with it in a walled compound immediately across from the factory island, known as Edo Block (Edo-machi). They were numerous, and five have already been mentioned: Namura Genjiro¯ and Naosaburo¯, Hori Gizaburo¯, Nishi Keiemon and Narabayashi Eizaemon. All posts were hereditary, and funded by the shogunate in senior (dai-tsu¯ji) or junior (ko-tsu¯ji) grades.89 Each New Year, eight men would be nominated to oversee all necessary work, four senior and four junior, with the seniors given five assistants each and the juniors three. Thus, a total of forty translators were on active service at any one time. The Europeans referred to these as the Board of Translators, and to the full collectivity as the Tolken College (tolk, pl. tolken, being Dutch for an interpreter, not actually a translator). One of the four nominated seniors and one of the juniors would work as ‘intermediary translators’ (nenban tsu¯ji), to liaise between the VOC and the governorate; another two, as seen above, would accompany the court trip to Edo (Edo-ban tsu¯ji). Introduction 21 Like many of those who used the translators’ services over the decades and centuries, Titsingh was not uniformly impressed. It was not until 1784 (just before he came back for his last innings), that a system was set up to allow the translators to receive drill from the native Dutch-speakers on Dejima.90 Before that, they instructed each other, usually father to son, which tended towards decreasing proficiency (see Figure 4). On first arrival, Titsingh found Namura Motojiro¯ in place as senior intermediary, and as junior, Domburg’s nemesis, Narabayashi Eizaemon. At New Year 1780, Yoshio Ko¯saku and Shige Setsuemon took over, becoming the two translators with whom Titsingh worked most during his first incumbency. Ko¯saku, at fifty-six, was one of the oldest and most important members of the College. He was the only survivor of the three translators commanded by , the eighth shogun, of esteemed memory, in 1751, to begin the translation of foreign books – an act previously banned (the other two were Nishi Zenzaemon and Motoki Jindayu¯, whose descendants still worked in the College).91 Shige Setsuemon was a much younger man, from a more minor translator family, in his late twenties.92 During his second stint, Titsingh encountered the intermediaries Hori Gizaburo¯ and Nishi Keiemon, who were replaced at New Year by Namura Katsuemon (father of Naosaburo¯, the secret go-between used by Titsingh and Hirotami) and Narabayashi Ju¯bei (nephew of the offensive Eizaemon); Katsuemon was in his fifties and Ju¯bei nearly thirty.93 Since he did not go to Edo that year, Titsingh would have got to know these two men closely. During Titsingh’s short, third incumbency, Ko¯saku was again senior inter- mediary and Motoki Einoshin (son-in-law of the pioneering Jindayu¯, and from the oldest translator family, in service since the 1630s), was junior.94 Titsingh never wrote a comprehensive assessment of the translators (though there are scattered references), but Baron van Reede did, included in a letter sent to Titsingh some years later, in 1787. The personnel Van Reede knew do not fully overlap with those of Titsingh’s incumbencies, but his opinions are useful nonetheless, as his the only extended appraisal ever made. Van Reede was most pleased with Namura Motojiro¯, the first senior translator Titsingh met; he regarded him as ‘the best, the most obliging and the most capable’.95 By contrast, he found Narabayashi Eizaemon, his junior partner to be (no surprise to those who liked Domberg) ‘an ugly old man ...a deceitful personality.’ Of the intermediaries during the second half of Titsingh’s first period, Van Reede assessed Yoshio Ko¯saku somewhat fondly as, ‘always the same old rogue, a total villain, but an oracle to the other translators’, and Shige Setsuemon as ‘a good fellow, upright and hard-working’, though ‘not exactly gifted by nature, and also poor’; Titsingh noted that Setsuemon had been ‘instructed by Dr Thunberg’, and was ‘very advanced’, though this may refer to his sideline interest of botany, and oddly Thunberg never mentioned him. Van Reede did not mention Hori Gizaburo¯, the senior intermediary for Titsingh’s second stint, since he had retired (this took place while Titsingh was chief, and he noted it in his log);96 as a result of Gizaburo¯’s departure, his son, Monju¯ro¯, already middle-aged, was moved up from provisional junior translator to junior translator; Van Reede called him ‘a dapper old chap who Figure 4 Translators’ signatures, from Motoki Einoshin (Ryo¯ei) (ed.), Shozasshoshu¯, handwritten manuscript; 1795. Kobe City Museum. Introduction 23 speaks good Dutch’; Titsingh identified him as ‘an intimate friend’.97 Another result of the retirement was that Eizaemon was promoted to fill Gizaburo¯’s vacant post, which required him to resign from the junior intermediary position, which now went to Monju¯ro¯. The popular Monju¯ro¯, it should be added, was to be made senior translator in 1788, but dismissed the following year as he had aroused suspicion by standing ‘above his peers in house, dress and servants’, the final straw coming when he purchased a European clock in defiance of the rules.98 Being nice had evidently paid off, though not for ever. Jobless, Monju¯ro¯ was taken on by Shimazu Shigehide as his Dutch advisor, in which capacity he continued for several years to meet the VOC officers.99 Van Reede went on: Nishi Keiemon, Gizaburo¯’s junior colleague in Titsingh’s second incumbency, was ‘a blustering old fool’; after New Year, in came Namura Katsuemon, ‘an utterly incompetent creature, unable to do anything at all’ (Van Reede conceded he was deft at Dutch expletives); by contrast, his junior, Narabayashi Ju¯bei was ‘a literate and sagacious youth’, though, ‘heavily indebted, which leads him to drink, so we can’t do that much with him’. Finally, the scion of the Motoki family, Einoshin, who served with Ko¯saku during Titsingh’s short, final term, was ‘sensitive to the point of half-wittedness and often unwell’. These are Van Reede’s views and they would not necessarily be shared by all. For example, Titsingh did not find Einoshin ‘half-witted’, and for some decade after leaving Japan, corresponded with him, exchanging information and presents, one being a New Year’s homily on longevity, which the family preserved ever after (see Figure 5).100 Motoki Einoshin (more often called Ryo¯ei), is actually one of the most famous names in the history of East–West relations in Japan, and he taught many Europeanist scholars of note. It was he who introduced , a samurai from Sendai (where his sister was concubine to the late daimyo, Date Muneyoshi) to Western things, when Shihei visited Nagasaki in 1777; 101 Shihei became a renowned scholar, and returned to Nagasaki for more research in 1782; on the former visit he had toured the Roodenrijs and the Zeeduijn, and received a glass, monogrammed with the VOC mark (which is extant);102 on the latter he may have met Titsingh, since their visits coincided. Einoshin also instructed O¯ tsuki Gentaku, the towering presence in European studies at the turn of the eighteenth century, who will be met below, and most relevantly for this book, Einoshin was a main source for Kutsuki Masatsuna, Titsingh’s best friend in all Japan.103 Finally, it was Einoshin who, in 1792, comprehensively introduced heliocentricity into Japan in his Taiyo¯ kyu¯ri ryo¯kai (Understanding solar science). Two other translators of this era stand out, and as both had close relations with Titsingh, they must also be allowed the testimony of voices other than Van Rheede’s. First, Narabayashi Ju¯bei. Titsingh confirms he had a drink problem, noting he would not budge without a glass of gin. But Titsingh was a famous toper too, and their shared weakness might have served to unite them.104 Titsingh valued Ju¯bei enough to give him a copy of Noël Chomel’s Dictionnaire oeconomique, of 1709, a household encyclopaedia well known in Japan and imported many times; this transfer became famous, and was mentioned in the best-selling Westernising work of the whole Edo Period, Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa (European miscellany), of 1787, Figure 5 Isaac Titsingh, New Year’s Wishes, handwritten manuscript; 1780, 1782 or 1783. Kobe City Museum. Introduction 25

Figure 6 Morishima Chu¯ryo¯, ‘Gun-trap’, from his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, monochrome printed book; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library. written by Hiraga Gennai’s successor, Morishima Chu¯ryo¯; Chu¯ryo¯ even reproduced a figure from Ju¯bei’s copy of Chomel, of a spring-loaded hunting trap (see Figure 6).105 Ju¯bei probably helped Titsingh with his data-gathering and translations. His dissolute lifestyle, though, was to be his undoing. Shimazu Shigehide gave him 500 koban (a massive sum) to buy ‘rarietes’ for his collection, but Ju¯bei blued it carousing in Nagasaki’s red-light district.106 Though promoted to senior translator in 1788, two years later he was sacked; reinstated only in 1795, he was sent out of Nagasaki to conduct investigations in Ezo, though while returning, he passed through Mito¯, where he is said to have met the daimyo, Tokugawa Haruyasu (a great honour), and, more certainly, he met Tachihara Suiken, rector of the city’s famous Confucian academy, who wrote down all he heard from Ju¯bei, as Yu¯rin zatsuwa (Narabayashi’s free talks).107 Ju¯bei, though a problematic personality, and to his end unworthy of his great promise, enthused many. Second, Yoshio Ko¯saku. His oracular presence figures large in Titsingh’s writings. Though a translator, he also had a sideline, and a lucrative one, in Western-style medicine. Titsingh referred only to Setsuemon as being taught by Thunberg, but Ko¯saku had been too, and had learnt from him a new treatment for syphilis (Van Sweiten’s method), on which he had grown extremely rich. Although Titsingh laughed at his arrogance and thought Ko¯saku occasionally ‘oozed pomposity’, the two were actually close, in a badinaging kind of way.108 Though he did not practise, Titsingh had trained as a physician and was interested in Japanese medicine, in which he was probably assisted by Ko¯saku, especially with regard to the fields that excited most attention in Europe – 26 Introduction and moxibustion – but without analogy in the Western curative arts. Acupuncture had been introduced to Europe by Willem ten Rhijne in his De acupunctura, of 1683, which expounded what he had learned as VOC physician in Japan in 1674–6; the book was old and quite obscure, but had been cited by Lorenz Heister in his de Chirurgie (On surgery), first published in 1718, and required reading for all north European physicians for the rest of the century.109 Back in Europe, Titsingh himself was to translate the texts to the 80 acupunctural diagrams of the Ju¯shi kei hatsugun (Ch.: Shishi jing fahui; Fourteen bodily humours), a fourteenth-century Chinese classic by Hua Pairen, known in Japan in numerous reprints and adap- tations.110 Titsingh worked on moxibustion too, and wrote a combined manuscript, Beschrijving van het naalde steeken en moxa branden (Description of acupuncture and moxibustion), though characteristically, he did not bring it to press, which is a pity since it corrected the fundamental Western misconception that the needles were inserted into the place where the pain was felt, not to corresponding points elsewhere (see Figure 7).111 This text was finally published in 1825, but without giving credit to Titsingh and without the illustrations, rendering at least the acupuncture section useless.112 Ko¯saku used his wealth to build a home that exceeded even Monju¯ro¯’s in grandeur, and acquire a fine collection to fill it. Ko¯saku’s mansion was constructed somewhat in the European manner, and its ‘Dutch rooms’ (oranda zashiki) became a mecca for all well-connected people visiting the town. When a physician from Kunisaki, Miura Baien, visited Nagasaki in late 1778 (his second trip), he was most impressed by, ‘the many extraordinary objects (kika) in the Yoshio house’.113 Baien saw two celestial globes, and Ko¯saku explained to him the theory of helio- centricity, which Baien disarmingly noted, ‘I have reflected on deeply, but cannot understand’.114 Baien did figure it out, though, and went on to become one of the period’s foremost philosophers of science; a delicately made globe he fashioned himself is extant.115 Though there is no proof that Titsingh visited Ko¯saku’s home, the ‘old rogue’ was surely someone Titsingh could not do without. An interesting parallel between Titsingh and Ko¯saku was reported by Tachibana Nankei, another physician, who visited Nagasaki from Edo in 1781: just as Ko¯saku lived in Dutch rooms, Titsingh had supposedly remodelled the chief’s suite on Dejima in the Japanese style, because ‘he was so greatly enamoured of local things’.116 Titsingh made a sketch of the chief’s lodgings, which was published in his book, and it does indeed show at least Japanese-style flooring and a karahafu gabled entrance, though Titsingh made no reference to any remodelling (see Figure 8). If the report is true, the result was not to Romberg’s taste, as, once he took over, he had the entire residence demolished and rebuilt.117 Nankei may not have gone onto Dejima, but he visited Ko¯saku’s Dutch rooms, thinking the experience ‘exactly like entering a real European house . . . all very awkward’.118 He included a picture in his

Figure 7 (opposite) Isaac Titsingh (transcribed), illustration to his, Description of Sticking with the Needle and of Burning Moxa in Several Complaints, handwritten manuscript; undated. Manchester: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

Figure 8 Anon., ‘House of the Chief of the Dutch Company’, illustration to Isaac Titsingh (Frederick Shoberl, trans.), Illustrations of Japan; 1822. London: Maggs Brothers, Ltd.

Figure 9 Hitotsuyanagi Kagen, Untitled [Ko¯saku’s Dutch Rooms], from Tachibana Nankei, Hokuso¯ sadan, monochrome printed book; 1825. Tokyo: National Diet Library. Introduction 29 published travel diary, showing himself and Ko¯saku being waited on by the translator’s young son and successor (see Figure 9). Another significant guest to Ko¯kaku’s Dutch rooms was the Edo artist and scholar Shiba Ko¯kan, in Nagasaki in 1788; he noted that Ko¯saku had a fine collec- tion of English paintings.119 In exchange for being wined and dined (wine was not commonly drunk), Ko¯kan extemporised a portrait of Ko¯saku, Western book in hand (apparently entitled Heelkunst, ‘the art of medicine’), with the trappings of apotheosis wafting above (see Figure 10).120 Ko¯kan’s six-week stay in Nagasaki was critical for him, for he learned several features of Western-style painting which, on return to Edo, he put into practice, becoming a prominent proponent of the style. Importantly, Ko¯kan was to claim that he met Titsingh in Nagasaki, and received from him a Dutch volume as a gift, Gérard de Lairesse’s Het Groot Schilderboek (Great book of painting), originally published in 1711, but with several later printings, widely translated and used right across Europe and North America.121 Ko¯kan certainly did have access to this book, as elements from it appear in his oeuvre, but it cannot have been Titsingh who gave it to him, as he was not in Nagasaki in 1788 (Van Reede was chief). It is possible that Ko¯kan met Titsingh in Edo, and received the book there, or else, for whatever reason, Ko¯kan gained access to a copy of the book – more than one copy was being passed around and several of its illustrations were reproduced in Chu¯ryo¯’s Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa – from another source, and fabricated a more impression line of transmission (see Figure 11). It has been claimed that Titsingh brought a painting by Ko¯kan back to Europe with him, though this is unproven and implausible.122 To complete Ko¯saku’s story, in 1790, while serving as senior intermediary, he was sacked and imprisoned. He was replaced by Ju¯bei, but only for a few days, since, as we have seen, Ju¯bei was arrested and imprisoned too. Both were apparently in on the same act, whatever the act was. They languished for five years. On release, Ju¯bei was sent to Ezo, again as noted above, but Ko¯saku was too old, and his career was over; he died in 1800.123 The sparring quality of Titsingh’s (and others’) relations with the translators was owing to the special proximity of their lives and the nature of their work. A less fraught friendship grew up between Titsingh and the head of the Nagasaki Office, Goto¯ So¯zaemon, who is his only other close Nagasaki associate. So¯zaemon was interested in Western philosophy and science, and the year before Titsingh’s arrival had ordered from Europe that icon of European experimentalism, a static electricity generator.124 So¯zaemon and Titsingh bonded as soon as they met, and had some three or four months of company. So¯zaemon was then arrested, not for smuggling, but for interceding in a civil dispute (kenka) between two Buddhist clerics, who were disturbing the town with a feud. The arrest occurred on 13 December. The very day after, Titsingh composed for him the ‘Philosophical Discourse’, translated here in Part III. We do not know what solace, if any, it brought So¯zaemon, nor even if he really understood its rather difficult concepts, but the gift was an index of real amity and affection. After six months in prison (half of which time Titsingh was on the court trip), So¯zaemon died – a not uncommon eventuality for those in the Tokugawa penal system. Titsingh recorded Figure 10 Shiba Ko¯kan, Yoshiho Koosak [Yoshio Ko¯saku], ink on paper; 1788. Private Collection. Introduction 31

Figure 11 Anon. (Morishima Chu¯ryo¯?), ‘Human Movements’, from his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, monochrome printed book illustration; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library. that he was ‘very favourably disposed towards the Dutch’, well liked in town too, and his death was ‘lamented by everyone because of his kind disposition’.125 Shortly afterwards, a ruling on the turbulent monks came through from Edo, and one was executed (the comeuppance of the other is unrecorded).

Titsingh and the Japanese scholars: in Edo Nagasaki was a town with a rather special flair, but it was inevitably provincial, seen on a Japan-wide level. Titsingh’s most important links were forged in Edo, for all that he spent no more than twice three weeks in the shogunal capital. In several cases, his brief encounters there were extended over many years, through epistolary exchange, allowing Titsingh to become quite familiar with figures of genuine cultural and political standing. The likes of Tanuma Okitsugu were beyond him, but four remarkably high-level associations were made, and each will be introduced in turn. The first has been mentioned above: Shimazu Shigehide, daimyo of Satsuma. Already in 1771, Shigehide had obtained shogunal permission to visit Nagasaki (as was required, as the town was Tokugawa land); the chief, Daniel Armenault, had taken him aboard the Burgh and given him a Dutch-style dinner at the factory; Shigehide was guided around the town’s important international sites by the translator Imamura Akinari, whom he then wooed from the Tolken College to work for him in his castle town in Satsuma.126 Thereafter, Shigehide’s always retained a personal Dutch interpreter (after Akinari, as we have seen, came the dismissed Hori Monju¯ro¯); he was the first daimyo to do this.127 Thanks to his 32 Introduction daughter Tadako’s fortuitously excellent espousal, Shigehide had increasing oppor- tunity to machinate, with interposing himself in international contacts his forte. Some said he planned to open Satsuma to foreign shipping, in rivalry with Nagasaki, and only held back from this when warned it would provoke a civil war.128 Many years on, Jan Cock Blomhoff, another factory chief, met an ageing Shigehide and described him as ‘the lord most feared in Japan’. They ‘discussed this and that and the other’, Shigehide ‘praised the Dutch nation highly’, and presented Blomhoff with four live pheasants.129 It is not clear how much direct contact Titsingh had with Shigehide. Titsingh is said to have persuaded him to appoint another Nagasaki scholar, Matsumura Mototsuna, to a post at the Satsuma state academy, the Meiji-kan, to teach Western astronomy, though this is not certain (and Mototsuna died almost at once).130 We have also observed that in 1780, under Titsingh, the VOC called at Shigehide’s palace when leaving Edo. Unrecorded exchanges perhaps took place, and indirect ones undeniably did; on the 1782 court trip Titsingh received two Satsuma physicians at the Nagasaki House, in thanks for which hospitality, Shigehide sent some live birds, five bonsai trees and three salmon, and Titsingh reciprocated with ‘some trifles and rarities’, three days after which Shigehide followed up with a brace of pheasants.131 On that same court trip, the entourage also stopped by Shigehide’s palace when leaving Edo, ‘at the request’ of the daimyo himself, where Titsingh found ‘his lordship, his family and several noble ladies had assembled’.132 A French traveller who met him many years later was told by Titsingh that he and Shigehide also exchanged letters, but if so, none is extant.133 One notch down, though still lofty enough, was Titsingh’s prime informant in Japan, Kutsuki Masatsuna. Shimazu Shigehide ruled one of the largest and richest states, and its lands yielded over 700,000 koku. By contrast, Masatsuna’s father, Kutsuki Nobutsuna, though a daimyo too, ruled Fukuchiyama (more romantically called Tanba), which yielded just 32,000 koku. But conversely, the Kutsuki were hereditary loyalists of the Tokugawa (fudai), whereas the Shimazu were mistrusted outer lords (tozama). Masatsuna was thus closer into webs of shogunal assistance and graft than Shigehide could ever be, even after his daughter’s betrothal. Masatsuna was an inheritor, but not (yet) a ruler, and so was much less daunting and had free time; at thirty he was younger than Titsingh too. The two got on remarkably well, enough for him to be called Titsingh’s most important and truest friend, and, with a familiarity only permitted to incomprehending foreigners, addressed by Titsingh by his common name, Sanmon (Titsingh’s ‘Samon’).134 Masatsuna was never in Nagasaki, and strangely, Titsingh left no specific record of meeting him in Edo either, in his official log, but perhaps that was not the place for private encounters. In both 1780 and 1782 his log records only generic meetings with ‘lords and other nobles’.135 In a letter to a colleague several years on, however, Titsingh claimed to have met Masatsuna at the Nagasaki House, though he does not say on which of his two court trips, unless he meant on both: Titsingh wrote, ‘the Lord of Tanba [sic, his son] kept me up ’til 12 every night I was in Edo’; but so excited was Titsingh by this that he was ‘willing to give up food, drink and sleep in order to make the most of the time’.136 Introduction 33 Masatsuna had begun to learn Dutch rather earlier under the great Edo scholar Maeno Ryo¯taku, who served as hereditary physician to Okudaira Masashika, daimyo of Nakatsu; then, following Shigehide, he had engaged a Nagasaki translator, Nishi Masakyu¯ro¯, to help him further.137 Masatsuna himself sponsored several Western-studies students, most notably O¯ tsuki Gentaku, whose tuition expenses in Nagasaki (where he worked with Motoki Einoshin), Masatsuna covered, leading to the link with Einoshin mentioned above. In 1788, Masatsuna wrote the preface to Gentaku’s pioneering kaitei (Ladder of European studies) half-encyclopaedia, half-language primer, which had been finished five years earlier, but was without a publisher; the work was successful enough to be reissued two years later, and when Yoshio Ko¯saku saw it in Edo, during his visit accompanying Van Reede, in its year of publication, he wistfully stated, ‘I haven’t written a work like it, and feel ashamed that I’ve been of so little worth and accomplished so little.138 Together with Morishima Chu¯ryo¯’s Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa (European miscellany), this was the most influential book on Europe in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Gentaku’s teacher in Edo, Sugita Genpaku (himself a sometime student of Ko¯saku), was later to record that Rangaku kaitei ‘circulated widely’, and that ‘many were they who had their eyes opened by it and were enthused by it.139 One such was Imamura Sanpaku, physician to Ikeda Harumichi, daimyo of Tottori, who came to Edo as a result, in 1792, where he made his name translating the 80,000-word Nederduits Woordenboek (Dutch dictionary) of François Halma, though sadly his daimyo was not impressed by this and sacked him; Gentaku, who thereafter lodged Sanpaku in Edo, was to call his own son ‘Hakugen’, fusing the two scholars’ names together (haku/paku + gen).140 Titsingh and Masatsuna often swapped materials relevant to each other’s studies, and there are several extant letters between them, Masatsuna’s were signed K. Samon, and sealed in wax impressed with the amalgamation of a European coat- of-arms and a (see Figure 12). At the end of his first stint as chief, on the very last day he was in Japan, 6 November, 1780 Titsingh inscribed and sent Masatsuna his copy of Nicholas Sanson’s Atlas nouveau, which he possessed in a pirated Dutch edition of the (massive though rather outdated) publication of 1692 (see Figure 13).141 Since childhood, Masatsuna’s great love had been numismatists.142 Via the VOC, he found a whole new world of coins to collect. This was an area where Titsingh could certainly help, and at uncertain date – perhaps over an extended period – he furnished Masatsuna with many European and colonial coins. In 1787, Masatsuna published most of these – though oddly, without any word of thanks to Titsingh – in a large and lavish book, Seiyo¯ zenpu (Western coinage) (see Figure 14). Two years later, he put out a more ambitious work, Taisei yochi zusetsu (Illustrated explanation of Western geography), and although again Titsingh is not named, the preface refers to one of his sources as ‘purehosuto’, that is, the well-known travel anthology of Abbé Antoine Prévost d’Exiles (more famous as author of Manon Lescaut), published in French in 1646–61, but taken to Japan in the 2nd Dutch edition of 1755–67;143 Titsingh is the likely donor of this work for a letter exists from Masatsuna thanking him for eight Western titles (three histories and 34 Introduction

Figure 12 Kutsuki Masatsuna, Signature and seal, from a handwritten list of Japanese coinage types sent to Titsingh, 1786. Manchester: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. geographies, five language texts and vocabularies), and though Prévost is not cited, it proves a book exchange with Titsingh of a kind that Masatsuna is not known to have had with anyone else.144 Another piece of evidence, still in the Kutsuki collection, is a copy of G. W. Knorr’s luxurious album of shells, Les délices des yeux et de l’esprit (1764–5), bearing Titsingh’s distinctive signature placed, as with Sanson’s Atlas, on the title page, so certainly given by him to Masatsuna’s (see Figure 15).145 A letter also exists from Masatsuna to Titsingh requesting a copy of Chomel’s Dictionnaire (perhaps he had seen the one Titsingh gave Einoshin), and for this, Masatsuna said, he would send Titsingh another recently issued publication of his own, Kaisei ko¯ho¯ zukan (Corrected illustrated mirror of coinage), together with the most widely read Japanese poetry anthology, Hyakunin isshu¯ (One hundred poems by one hundred poets), hand-annotated by Masatsuna himself, in Dutch, for Titsingh’s benefit, and he added that he would be happy to send Japanese coins to Titsingh in exchange for Mughal, Bengali, Ottoman and African ones.146 There is one more important book exchange to note. It would seem that Masatsuna obtained from Titsingh a copy of Johannes Martinet’s Katechismus der Natuur (Catechism of nature), an immensely popular morality tract, which began its long life in 1777, remained in print until 1829, and was translated (sometimes in expanded, sometimes in abridged editions) into more languages than any other piece of Dutch prose of the period.147 In late November 1784, a report appeared in a Rotterdam newspaper, Rotterdamsche Courtant, claiming Martinet was being put into Japanese by ‘Sammon same Landheer van Tamba’ (Lord Sanmon, daimyo Figure 13 Nicolas Sanson, Atlas nouveau, monochrome printed title page; 1692. Ex-collection Titsingh and Kutsuki. Kanazawa: Ishikawa Prefectural Library. 36 Introduction

Figure 14 Anon., from Kutsuki Masatsuna, Seiyo¯ zenpu, monochrome woodblock book illustration; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library. of Tanba). The newspaper’s source is said to be a letter recently arrived from Batavia, and this would surely have been sent by Titsingh, then in Java. Martinet was a friend of the Titsingh family. His biographer, A. van den Berg (also friend of the Titsinghs’), stated that the author was informed of this Japanising of his text, and was thrilled by it.148 There are problems, however. Titsingh could not have had the whole Katechismus with him, as Volume II onwards appeared only in 1779, long after his departure from Europe and even too late to have been forwarded by a later ship. If he was his source, Titsingh had probably passed to Masatsuna just Volume I, which had been published in time; but no copy of the Katechismus exists in Masatsuna’s surviving collection, nor is there any Japanese translation of it known, even in draft. A significant fact is that Titsingh’s ‘Philosophical Discourse’, sent to So¯zaemon in prison, is, in essence, a précis of the first volume of Martinet.149 Titsingh and Masatsuna kept up their epistolary exchange after Titsingh quit Japan. In 1786, Masatsuna inherited his father’s position and would have become exceedingly occupied; when Titsingh returned to Europe, correspondence became almost impossible, and Titsingh wrote sadly that ‘the continual war’ was ‘a much regretted, but permanent obstacle’.150 Masatsuna’s last letter to him is dated 4 April 1789, and it mentions mutual friends, such as Kuze Hirotami, Shimazu Shigehide and Katsuragawa Hoshu¯ (brother of Morishima Chu¯ryo¯, who will be introduced below). Titsingh wrote his last letter to Masatsuna in June 1807, but only to enquire whether the previous one, sent in May 1801 (on which day he had also penned a letter to Hori Monju¯ro¯) had arrived. Masatsuna had retired in 1800, handing on the Figure 15 Anon., from G. W. Knorr, Délice des yeux et de l’esprit: collection des différentes espèces de coquillages, vol. 1, hand-coloured copperplate book illustration; 1764–5. Ex-collection Titsingh and Kutsuki. Oita: Oita Prefectural Library. 38 Introduction state to his son, Mototsuna, who pre-deceased him the next year, and Masatsuna followed suit in 1802;151 Masatsuna’s grandson, Tsunagata, the ruling daimyo, either did not receive Titsingh’s last letters, or, with the world then greatly changed, ignored them; Monju¯ro¯, long since sacked, was still living, but in an unknown location, and his letter was likely undeliverable. The third member of Titsingh’s quartet of associates in Edo was Katsuragawa Hoshu¯, just mentioned. He was a body physician (oku-i) to the shogun, a post that on Titsingh’s arrival he had recently inherited from his father. Hoshu¯ had spent time with Thunberg, and had learned from him Van Sweiten’s cure for syphilis. Years later, Hoshu¯ recorded, ‘I have got to know some thirty Westerners [saijin] in my time, but have never known his equal in complete dedication to the pursuit of knowledge’.152 This was said in reference to Thunberg, and thus, Hoshu¯ found Thunberg more impressive than Titsingh. Nevertheless, he and Titsingh admired each other, and Hoshu¯, as much as Ko¯saku, may have been Titsingh’s source on acupuncture and moxibustion, and he could have been the one who gave Titsingh the set of 80 plates whose captions Titsingh translated: it had been Hoshu¯’s ancestor, Katsuragawa Kunimichi, who had been ten Rhijne’s source some century before, as Hoshu¯ would have enjoyed telling Titsingh (and before him Thunberg, who was also informed about acupuncture), and perhaps emulating his forebear by bestowing additional but similar medical knowledge on European doctors deficient in skill.153 Several gifts came and went between Titsingh and Hoshu¯. The former recorded receiving a collection of minerals from him (he had given some to Thunberg too, and these were by then in Uppsala University). Titsingh and he kept up a correspondence at least until 1787.154 Hoshu¯’s brother, Morishima Chu¯ryo¯, when he needed a generic personal name for his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa (to demonstrate how surname followed given name in Europe), used the example of Titsingh: ‘Isaac is the given name and Titsingh the family name. If he were to have a child, it would be called something Titsingh’.155 Titsingh’s official log does not refer to his meeting Hoshu¯ in Edo any more than it mentions Masatsuna, but here too there are hints. On his first court trip, Titsingh noted on two occasions receiving visits by ‘shogunal doctors’ who, he said, ‘asked all manner of questions’; on the second visit, Titsingh was frustrated and snapped, ‘I think the incompetence of my translators [Ko¯saku and Setsuemon] will be a hindrance to them’; Titsingh gave these doctors red pencils as a present to compensate.156 On his second court trip, Titsingh again refers to receiving ‘shogunal doctors’ (as well as the two from Satsuma), though this time his translators (Gizaburo¯ and Keiemon) were up to the job, and the physicians ‘left satisfied’.157 The fourth and final person to introduce here from Titsingh’s prime Edo asso- ciates was one of the greatest polymathic minds of the entire period, Matsura Kiyoshi, daimyo of Hirado. (He was later to become known as ‘Seizan’, a name sometimes carelessly applied back to his younger days.) Kiyoshi made his own first contact with European things in Nagasaki, from which Hirado was not far, in 1775, aged fifteen, just months after inheriting his Introduction 39 state from his grandfather (his father had pre-deceased him). Though far below Satsuma, Hirado was wealthier than Fukuchiyama, and Kiyoshi enjoyed an income of somewhat over 60,000 koku (in 1795 this would be raised to 100,000). Crucially, the Matsura had an important role in the history of East–West relations, since Hirado had been location of the first Dutch, and the English factories in the early seventeenth century, and Kiyoshi was aware of this. When Kiyoshi gained access to Dejima, he was one of the first daimyo to do so.158 Armenault, then chief, was given just one day to prepare for this exceptional visit, but it passed off well, and Kiyoshi sent a present of two kegs of sake to express his gratitude; he stayed on in town to see the arrival of that year’s ships, though one, the Bleijenburgh, was damaged and had diverted to Canton. But he toured the other, the Stavenisse, though whether he met Thunberg, who had arrived on it, is unsure.159 It was Kiyoshi who said his meeting with Titsingh occurred in Edo, and so it must have been in the spring of either 1780 or 1782, when the young daimyo was either twenty or twenty-two. He added the court trip was chaotic that year as the Nagasaki House had just burned down, and the VOC were billeted on a temple. The Nagasaki House did indeed burn down, more than once, most horrifically in 1772, when Feith and his team had actually been in it, in a larger conflagration, and Feith recorded, ‘it seemed the whole town was on fire’; they were relodged ‘in a primitive manner’, with the Edo-based governor of Nagasaki; notwithstanding this, some years later Feith was to tell Thunberg that they were relodged in a temple.160 The next incineration, closer to Titsingh, occurred in 1778, when again Feith was in charge, though this time the building was lost prior to their arrival so arrangements could be made, and they were placed ‘in another inn’; the next spring, Feith was back (doing a double stint because of the death of Duurkoop), and he noted the Nagasaki House had been ‘completely rebuilt’.161 Kiyoshi said he met Titsingh in the VOC’s temporary lodgings, in a temple, in Asakusa, in the north-east of Edo. This could be Feith’s ‘other inn’ since although the he did not mention this was within a religious precinct, he could just have failed to recognise the building – he could hardly have confused an inn with the gover- nor’s mansion. His diary of the time must outweigh his later retelling to Thunberg. Moreover, Feith noted the shogunal crown prince, Iemoto (whose premature death would beckon Shigehide’s future son-in-law), passed by on his way to visit a temple, so a location in Asakusa, the main Buddhist district, would make sense. Thus 1778 might seem likely. But Titsingh was not in Japan then. The Nagasaki House did not burn down either time Titsingh was in Edo. It is possible therefore that Kiyoshi actually met Feith, not Titsingh at all. But to hear him out, looking back, perhaps hazily, Kiyoshi wrote:

In a past year, when the Dutch arrived on their court trip, they had to stay at a temple, in Asakusa, because their official lodgings had burned down. I was still young at the time, and conceived the idea of sneaking in at night to visit them in this billet. Their chief was called Titsingh. Later he became very distinguished. Through an interpreter, the foreigners were informed of my position and they showed me great respect. 40 Introduction Kiyoshi claimed to have remained there for many hours (the term used, su¯koku, implies about all night), and Titsingh, if it was he, took advantage to ask his opinion of a pair of sword-guards he had brought from Batavia.

During our pleasant conversation, Titsingh rose, opened his luggage, and pulled something out from the bottom of it. He came up to me and said, ‘these are rather special, and I brought them here in secret. Your lordship’s state has a long and close connection with foreign ships like ours, and these objects recall that history. [They look Japanese, but] not being sure whether fine workmanship of this sort is carried out in your country, I brought them here to investigate. I would like your view on them’.

They did look Japanese, but Kiyoshi recognised them as of a foreign alloy. Someone then butted in, ‘the guards that Titsingh holds were assuredly made by descendants of Japanese people living abroad. It is known that emigrants produced things like this.’162 The problem was resolved. Titsingh gave the guards to Kiyoshi as a present, and the daimyo carefully sketched them for wider circulation (see Figure 16). Titsingh and Kiyoshi met again, and this time the details are more secure. Just after New Year 1782, Kiyoshi was delighted when divers hauled an old ship’s anchor from the sea off Hirado. It could have been English, but with those contacts dead, a Dutch connection seemed better to press for. The court trip was coming up, Titsingh’s second, and when the retinue arrived in Edo, Kiyoshi approached Titsingh for some kind of antiquarian critique of the anchor. Titsingh wrote a flowery dedication, though he had not seen the anchor as it had not been brought up to Edo, and Kiyoshi added this to the delicately rendered paintings, substantial essays and other reminiscences, in all a dozen celebratory pieces, that he had already ordered to memorialise the find (see Figure 17). Motoki Einoshin (half-wit to some, inspirational teacher to others) helped Kiyoshi with Titsingh’s Dutch.163 The next year, Kiyoshi was back in his home region, and he took the opportunity to visit Nagasaki. He met Ko¯saku, who received him in his European rooms, and Kiyoshi was shown a copy of the Dutch translation of Kaempfer’s English History of Japan, which he then bought, he said, ‘for very little money’ (Ko¯saku parting with it cheaply for the sake of furthering a useful connection, perhaps).164 It was now late 1784, Titsingh had just sailed for Batavia, and Romberg was chief, but his official log contains no mention of a visit by Kiyoshi, and perhaps he did not make one, for visits to the VOC compound by a daimyo were exceptionally rare (during Titsingh’s total of forty-four months, for example, only two visited – Toda Tadato¯, daimyo of Shimabara, and Kuroda Haruyuki, daimyo of Chikuzen).165 Still, Romberg may have met Kiyoshi, for from about this time it became VOC practice to send Kiyoshi two bottles of wine and two of rosewater whenever ships unloaded, suggesting personal connections were being maintained.166 These four powerful contacts – Shigehide, Masatsuna, Hoshu¯ and Kiyoshi – belonged to the shogunal elite. Titsingh had very little knowledge of the opposite court, that of the dairi, in Miyako. The VOC stayed in that city both going to and Introduction 41

Figure 16 Anon., from Matsura Kiyoshi (Seizan), Kasshi yawa, ink on paper; late nineteenth century. Private Collection. coming from Edo, but for days, not weeks. They had no official reception with the dairi authorities, though they did meet the shogun’s plenipotentiary in Miyako, the Kyo¯to shoshidai (whom they idiosyncratically called the Chief Justice of Japan, or such like); on Titsingh’s first court trip, the incumbent was Kuze Hiroakira, a close relation of the good Nagasaki governor, Kuze Hirotami; on the second trip, there had been a change (this was not a rotating post: there was only one shoshidai; the change in incumbent was because of Hiroakira’s retirement). Makino Sadanaga had been installed. The audiences were apparently formal and clipped. There is, however, one single reference to Titsingh meeting, in more congenial circum- stances, one senior figure of the dairi’s entourage. This was Ogino Gengai, court physician, and one of the greatest doctors of his day. Gengai had already served the dairi for some thirty years, and later would have his excellence confirmed by being summoned to Edo to treat the shogun. Gengai seems to have sought out informed Europeans, and he met Thunberg, who wrote of him, 42 Introduction

Figure 17 Anon. (illus.), Isaac Titsingh (inscript.), ink and colour on paper; 1782. Hirado: Matsura Shiryo¯kan.

I had a private visit from the dairi’s, or the ecclesiastical emperor’s, body physician. He is about the middle age and his name is Ogino Sahyo¯e Ie no Sakon.167 . . . He brought me several herbs, the most of them just gathered, the use of which he was very desirous of knowing, as well as of gaining some intelligence with regard to the cure of certain disorders. Our conversation was carried on through an interpreter; but he was not a little surprised when once, in order to fix the name of a plant in his memory with the greater certainty, I wrote it down before his face in Japanese characters.168

Titsingh did not record so much, but he received more, obtaining from Gengai a superb two-volume hand-painted album depicting seventy-seven plants, entitled Taishu¯ -en so¯moku-fu (Album of plants and trees from the Taishu¯ garden) (see Figure 18).169 An inscription prefacing the album makes it clear that Titsingh dropped a heavy hint that he wanted some such thing, and that the courtly Gengai could not object. The inscription was added by someone who appears to identify himself as a student of Gengai’s called Shimagawa Nanso¯, though he is otherwise unknown;170 Nanso¯ refers to his master by the erudite, Sinicised variant of his name that Titsingh (though oddly not Thunberg, who uses his court title) also referred to him by. He wrote, Figure 18 Anon. (trad. attrib. wife of Ogino Gengai), ‘Pomegranate’, page from Taishu¯- en so¯moku-fu, ink and colour on paper; 2 vols, 1786. Manchester: John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. 44 Introduction The noble Mr Teki is a gentleman learned in many fields. He is without adequate successor in [my] younger generation of scholars, and there is nothing about which he is ill informed. In this year of hinoe-uma [see below], he commissioned a fine painter to depict one tenth of the plants in his medicinal garden . . . over seventy items in all. The flowers, leaves, roots, branches, petals, stamens and pistils, fruits, bases of flowers and fruits, are the height of accomplishment. He presents it to the European kapitan [chief], who asked in advance. From olden times there are those who have known the names of plants, trees, birds and animals. But only in our fair land are people aware enough of their true properties, to desire to form collections. [The chief] will take this back to his foreign country, discuss whether such plants exist there or not, and compare similarities and differences. This is worth studying comprehensively, but also worth simply enjoying. It so happened that I visited the Teki household, and the old gentle- man brought this out to show me, soliciting an inscription of some sort. I immediately wrote one down, as was required of me.171

Hinou-uma occur every sixty years, and this one must be 1786. The two volumes were therefore painted for and sent to Titsingh, by then in Batavia. Genkai seems not to have been especially excited by this, but his sense of social obligation was highly developed and he had something produced that was superb; his assigning of the inscription to a student looks like a snub. Regrettably the name of the ‘fine painter’ (zen-gasha) was not given, although, absurdly, a groundless rumour was initiated by the French traveller who later met Titsingh, mentioned above, (who perhaps actually heard it from Titsingh) that the plants were depicted by Gengai’s wife though Titsingh’s only extant references to the pictures does not claim this.172 When he saw the volumes, this French traveller said he doubted ‘anything more perfect in its kind exists’; Titsingh’s French editor, Rémusat, said the pictures were ‘exquisitely painted on fine Japanese paper’, and he believed when taken with Titsingh’s other acquisitions, they constituted, ‘a flora japonica more complete and more detailed’ – he meanly claimed – ‘than Thunberg’s’;173 Thunberg’s well-received Linnaean Flora Japonica had appeared in 1784. The above leads us (though somewhat circuitously) to the issue of Titsingh’s association with Japanese women. Pace his fleeting encounters with Shigehide’s ladies at the two stop-offs at the Satsuma mansion in Edo, like any European he could not easily meet Japanese women; his female interlocutors would have been restricted to the denizens of the Maruyama, Nagasaki’s red-light district. These women, though, constituted a good route for the ebb and flow of information across the cultural and linguistic boundaries. Few women of the quarter could develop an interest in philosophy or science, but the pleasure districts of the Edo period were not mere sex emporia either, and women there were expected to have proper conversational skills, and the quality of hari (repartee, or perhaps ‘spunk’) was much admired. Titsingh is known to have retained a courtesan named Ukine.174 As with all her Introduction 45 kind, it is hard to retrieve much personal information about her. Though young (probably in her mid-teens), she held the top, tayu¯, grade, which would certainly have meant she had hari, as well as beauty.175 This was the first time a European had secured the attentions of a tayu¯. Her fee would be 22 monme (slightly over one third of a gold coin), of which 7 went to her and the rest to the bordello.176 Titsingh took home to Europe a model of a Maruyama brothel, in fond recollection, ‘a little masterpiece’, said our French traveller.177 Titsingh fathered no children in Japan, through Maruyama women occasionally gave birth to mixed-race children. Thunberg, who had investigated the matter, heard two rumours about the lives of such offspring: that they were killed, or were deported; he noted, ‘I cannot believe the Japanese to be inhuman enough for the former procedure, nor is there any instance of the latter having taken place’, and he observed a six-year-old girl living on Dejima with her father, whom she ‘much resembled’.178 The Japanese theory that mixed-race children rarely survived into adulthood inclined the authorities to be benign towards them.179 Most information on the connections between Maruyama women and European men is anecdotal, if not outright fictitious. Across Japan, the Maruyama was known as the sole accessible site of international sexual encounter, and this spawned many comments, salacious and humorous, and many pictures (see Figure 19).180 Stories such as of women smuggling imports in their pudenda, or of children born without heels (raised European shoes indicating their absence on the feet) were as rife as the claim that Europeans collected vaginal secretion, some said to prolong life, some said to prolong erections.181 Titsingh would have heard all this, but it has left no specific trace in his writings, nor on writings on him.

Figure 19 Anon., from Ehon kaname ishi, monochrome woodblock-printed book illustration; 1782. Private Collection. 46 Introduction To close, it is also worth mentioning that although Titsingh also had no traceable sexual relations with Japanese men. He did, however, comment on the prevalence of male same-sex activity – as visitors to Japan so often have, throughout the ages. Titsingh considered homosexuality ‘a general public vice’, practised, he opined, either because Japanese women were ‘masculine in character’, or as a form of birth control.182 He retold an earlier story about one of the Japanese translators, unnamed, who had lost his job for repeatedly propostioning a young Dutchman, also unnamed, causing some grief to Yoshio Ko¯saku, who was then in charge.183 Interestingly, Titsingh does not seem to have had a problem with the Nagasaki governor, again unnamed, but probably the favoured Hirotami, turning up for their meetings accompanied by his catamites, to whom, he said, the governor ‘had recourse to pass away the time’; Titsingh readily conceded these boys were ‘as beautiful as the loveliest girls’.184 He noted, in contrast, and no doubt correctly, that Japanese men found it comic how Europeans would only sleep with women, and Morishima Chu¯ryo¯ recorded something similar in his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, using data provided by the scribe on the 1787 court trip, Jean-Baptist Ricard, who informed Chu¯ryo¯ that male–male sex (nanshoku) was considered ‘against nature’ and even prohibited in Europe.185

Ship-building One of the important matters to Titsingh, about which gyrated the competing interpersonal liaisons described above, and which stems from them, must now be addressed. It was the single most concerted effort that Titsingh made to alter the Japan into which he came, and which he intently observed. This related to the building of a shogunal fleet. Fascination with the massive Dutch ships was great. Those who went to Nagasaki, timed their visits (like Kiyoshi), if they could, to coincide with an early- summer arrival or late-autumn sailing. But it was believed, wrongly, that the first shogun, , had promulgated the law that no Japanese ship could be built with a capacity of over of 500 koku (approx 100,000 litres), and since on his death in 1616, Ieyasu had been deified, as the Great Shining Avatar of the East (to¯sho¯ dai-gongen – hence Titsingh refers to him below as ‘the Gongen’), his laws, however old and outdated, could not be erased. Actually, it was Ieyasu’s grand- son, Iemitsu, who had made the law in 1637.186 Still, this mistaken weight of divine prohibition on large wrighting was highly debilitating. The ban made the shogunate totally dependent on the VOC for some commodities, and this stoked increasing anxiety as the VOC margin shrank, and the Company seemed to be toying with the idea of pulling out. Already in 1719, alarm had been registered when, in a freak triple accident, all three Japan-bound ships (the limit of two had not yet been set) did not appear; a group of wealthy Nagasaki merchants consulted the very best soothsayers of Miyako to assess the reasons for this, and were told the day on which the ships would arrive, which, however, came and went, leaving the clairvoyants to be excoriated, stated the VOC chief, Joan Aouwer.187 That had been an isolated year, but by Titsingh’s time, non-arrival was becoming the Introduction 47 norm. Notwithstanding the taboo caused by belief in Ieyasu’s law, some, like Tanuma Okitsugu, were inclined to venture to surmount it. There was, though, the more practical problem of total loss of once extensive Japanese ocean-going shipbuilding techniques. Although the documentation is scant – these were high political secrets – it appears that Okitsugu, through his hand-picked governor, Kuze Hirotami, privately negotiated with Titsingh on this very matter. Bringing Batavian shipwrights to Japan was one mooted option, but not the preferred one, because of its visibility. Titsingh proposed taking Japanese carpenters to Batavia instead, and was confident he could assemble 20,000 men ‘within a month’, though even a couple of hundred would suffice, he said.188 To impress Hirotami with the excellence of the European stock over any other (he could have sought Chinese help), Titsingh several times permitted a Japanese crew to sail the boats of the Trompenburg around the confines of Nagasaki Bay, which must have been an astonishing spectacle, never seen before or since.189 Hirotami was very nearly convinced, but he wanted to see a model first. Accurate table-top ships had been requested before, the first as far back as 1646, by Iemitsu himself; it had arrived two years later, but owing to a trade spat, the VOC was not invited to Edo for the next two years, so it was delivered only in 1649, and then to the shogun’s son, Ietsuna, as Iemitsu was declining fast and could not grant an audience.190 This gift was well known in Europe as it was recorded in Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Japonnensi of 1670, although the vagaries of its bestowal were glossed over; the ship was of silver, and a Dutch jeweller, Cornelius May, accom- panied the piece, and explained to the shogun, said Montanus, all its workings, with ‘two hours spent in this instruction’.191 No second model was requested until 1718, in response to which the factory chief, Christiaen van Vrijebergh, ‘made a list of all the dimensions of the ship’ (either the Meeroog or the Termissen), and sent them to Edo. The following year Van Vrijebergh was reminded that a model was desired, and in embarrassment that none had come (and, of course, given the triple disaster of 1719, there was not even a real ship to look at), he lent a model that he owned privately, which was kept by the governorate for several weeks (perhaps secretly sent to Edo and back) before being returned.192 There is no record of the requested second model ship ever arriving, Now, Hirotani asked again. This time, however, the Japanese had also been modelling: as Titsingh was preparing to leave, after his second eighteen-month stay, he was presented by Hirotami with what is described as the model of a ship ‘like the Trompenburg’, which vessel had been lying alone in Nagasaki Bay since 26 August.193 As it was now 12 October, there had been ample time to make a copy, at least approximately, using external observation but there were recalcitrant issues, which is why Titsingh was approached; he was asked to take the object to Batavia, and add ‘the sails and whatever else was lacking in the rigging’.194 Hirotami also requested a Dutch-made piece, to be ‘a model of a vessel with a well-closed superstructure’, that is, a ship that could be smaller than the Trompenburg, but would solve the problem of the open stern typical of Japanese vessels, which made them, whatever their size, liable to take water in heavy seas, and so be non-viable 48 Introduction on the ocean. Titsingh was, in fact, able to have the sails and rigging fitted to the Japanese model before departure, for which Hirotami sent thanks, but also a reminder that he was ‘insisting on a model of a solid boat’ the following year.195 Titsingh duly came back for his short, third stint the next summer, and he brought the model, representing a lighter, that is, a coastal vessel, not ocean-going, but still twice as capacious as the largest Japanese ship and with a securely closed stern. Titsingh left that autumn and never knew the fascinating afterlife of his model. It was over two years later, in January 1787, that Romberg, factory chief, saw an unfamiliar vessel enter Nagasaki harbour; he asked for details, and wrote in his log,

it was flush-decked and had, apart from its ordinary mast, another small one resembling a flagpole, and on the bow a sort of bowsprit no thicker than a spar, on which a small sail and another foresail like a jib were set. The poop is closed and heels over backward, while the rudder is like that of a longboat. The Japanese call it Sankoekmal which means ‘copied from three countries’, namely Holland, China and Japan, but it does not resemble anything either Dutch or Chinese and, glancing at it, it does not seem possible that it can carry that much cargo, but one is used to the fact that Japanese tend to overstate the case.196

Romberg was told it had been built using Titsingh’s model. The Sangoku-maru (as its name would now be romanised) soon left Nagasaki, and after some mirth at its expense, the VOC seem to have forgotten it. The court trip departed the next month, taking Romberg to Edo. But while he was gone, the vessel came back, its skipper bearing important news that required an imme- diate meeting with the senior intermediary, Yoshio Ko¯saku, who transmitted the information to Hendrik Ulps, deputising for Romberg: two three-masters had been spotted at sea, not flying any flag, but with crews ‘dressed in Dutch fashion’; they sailed so close to the Sangoku-maru that each group had been able to see the other.197 Ulps knew no VOC ships were in the vicinity and doubted the veracity of the story, and the resident governor, Mizuno Tadamichi (in Nagasaki for the first time to replace Toda Tamitake), dismissed it too.198 But it was true. The Japanese sailors had just met vessels of Louis XVI, though they were no more aware of this than were the French that they had just encountered the most peculiar object in Japanese maritime history. Anxious for a feat to rival Captain Cook, Louis had dispatched two ships, the Bussole and Astrolabe, from Brest, in summer 1785, under the leadership of Jean- François Galoupe, recently ennobled as Count de la Pérouse, in an expedition made up of ‘men of the deepest science and most brilliant talents of France’.199 La Pérouse’s commission was to plot the west coast of North and South America, and proceed to Asia and Australia. By late May 1787, his ships were in the Sea of Japan. La Pérouse’s log was subsequently published, in 1798, as Voyage autour du monde, and almost simultaneously in English as Voyage Around the World. The entry for that 2 June states, Introduction 49 We descried two Japanese ships, one of which passed us within hail. It had a crew of twenty men all dressed in blue cassocks of the make of those used by our priests. This vessel was about 100 tons burden, and had only one very tall mast in the middle ...The Astrolabe hailed her as she passed, but we neither understood her answer nor her crew our question, and she continued her course to the southward, hastening, no doubt, to announce her meeting with two foreign ships in seas where no European vessel had ever been seen before.200

La Pérouse and company were as unimpressed by the Sangoku-maru as Romberg had been. They thought it dangerously open to water so ‘it could not be safe in heavy seas’, despite having been based on a model with a ‘well-enclosed super- structure’. The on-board French draftsmen, Duché de Vancy and Prévost the Younger, sketched the ship from varying angles, and two of their renditions appear among the fifty-odd figures contained in La Pérouse’s Voyage, as reworked for publication by one Blondelle. It is labelled bateau japonais (‘Japanese Boat’ in the English), but it was a most abnormal one (see Figure 20). The Sangoku-maru left Nagasaki for the second time in August 1787. Narabayashi Ju¯bei, briefing Romberg after his return from the court trip, mentioned the report of two three-masters, but told him the skipper had proven untrustworthy, and even been arrested for secretly selling part of his cargo ‘to the Chinese on the open sea’ (the vessel was now under the command of another), so the tale could be discounted.201 La Pérouse was shipwrecked as he headed south, and all his crew were lost. Fortunately, his papers collected thus far had been removed at Avatscha and taken safely back to Paris overland, thus allowing publication. No one in Nagasaki seems to have heard anything for eighteen months again. Then, in January 1789, Romberg was told that ‘the Sangoku-maru, the boat which was made after the model that was sent in 1784, has run aground off Matsumae. All thirty crew members were saved by a barge which was sailing alongside it.’ The reference to the barge explains La Pérouse’s mention of two ships, despite depiction of only one. Romberg allowed himself another generalisation: ‘this proves that they should not occupy themselves trying to copy something strange, for they do not know how to to handle it, as I myself witnessed’.202 The Sangoku-maru floundered and sank on the 2nd of the 10th lunar month, 1787, which corresponds to 11 November. This is some eighteen months after Romberg was informed, but under six since being seen by the French.203 Already a shift in politics had cast doubt on the idea of a shogunal fleet. An anti-Okitsugu faction was taking advantage of the unreliability of the VOC to argue the opposite cause, namely that with so many years passing without a full complement of foreign ships, and no massive problems resulting, the Europeans could clearly be dispensed with once and for all. This conservative faction, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent what they saw as Okitsugu’s dangerous slippage towards openness, assassinated his son, Tanuma Okitomo (whom Titsingh refers to by his rank as Yamashiro-no-kami). Okitsugu had haughtily raised his offspring to a young eldership, which was resented by the established shogunal elite; his (a)

(b)

Figure 20 (a and b) Duché de Vancy or Prévost the Younger (Blondelle, sculp.), ‘Japanese Boat’, pages from J. C. de la Perouse (anon., trans.), Voyage Around the World, monochrome copperplate book illustrations; 1798. London: The British Library. Introduction 51 free-trade policies had not brought wealth to all, and his detractors came to outnumber his supporters. Across all social classes there was a feeling that the experiment in liberalisation had gone far enough. Added to this was a string of poor harvests, which led the populace to conclude that the regime had gone astray, since foul weather and bad government were held to go together. Any number of scurrilous rhymes circulated, and many were recorded by Titsingh, and appear in his section on poetry below. As Okitomo’s coffin was being carried through the streets of Edo, it was stoned by the masses. Okitsugu scaled back his policies. Titsingh’s hopes came to naught. His truncated third incumbency ended within weeks of the assassination, and he would later claim that he did not know of the murder until he had returned to Batavia, but this cannot be true. The assassination, he later admitted ‘annihilated all our hopes’, and it must have been one reason for his quitting Japan, forever.204 Okitsugu clung to power for another eighteen months, but resigned in summer 1786. Executive authority passed to Matsudaira Sadanobu, daimyo of Shirakawa and a close shogunal relative. He did not take the always-suspect post of ‘favourite’, but carved out a new one for himself as ‘chair of the elders’ (ro¯ju¯ shu¯za), in effect, chief minister, which he assumed in 1787.205 The shogun, Ieharu, had died the previous year, and his replacement with Shigehide’s intended son-in-law, Ienari, might have formed a liberalising counterweight, but the new shogun was just thirteen, and Sadanobu found ways to restrict Shigehide’s access. He instituted a raft of legislation known as the Kansei Reforms, with ‘Kansei’, the era that spans 1789–1800 (thus as a label it is somewhat anachronistic), having the meaning ‘lenient government’ (kansei). It proved to be otherwise. Whatever misgivings there had been about the regime of Okitsugu, all were united in opposing Sadanobu. He put both town and country under full surveillance, hampered outlets of creativity and commerce, and in both economic and intellectual spheres people found them- selves checked and constrained. Titsingh was gone, but Romberg darkly noted that Nagasaki was ‘teeming with informers’ and even among the VOC’s friends, ‘enmity and strive are rife’.206

Japan after Titsingh After Titsingh’s final departure, in late autumn 1784, life on Dejima went on much as before, though with lowered expectations of what the future might bring. The next few governors, who set the pace of encounters, did not excite such emotions, for or against, as had Tsuge Masakore and Kuze Hirotami. One of the Tsuchiyas was already dead and the other went into retirement in 1785, Toda Tamitake likewise, in 1786. Mizuno Tadamichi lasted until 1792, perfectly competently, first rotating with Matsura Nobutane, then with Sueyoshi Toshitake. Lower down in the governorate, many of the translators that Titsingh had known continued to work, and Van Reede’s subsequent analysis of the translators has been discussed above. Among his Edo contacts, Shigehide, Masatsuna, Hoshu¯ and Kiyoshi all had long careers ahead of them. Nagasaki lulled, but some indication of how the lives of the Edo quartet unfolded, after Titsingh was gone, may be useful. 52 Introduction For several years following, all four Edo friends made springtime visits to the Nagasaki House, if they could. On the next court trip, in 1785, Romberg went with Ulps and Hendrik Duurkoop, nephew of the former chief (both were scribes, as again there was no physician at the factory); the accompanying translators were Motojiro¯ and Monju¯ro¯. Shigehide sent along a present, but was too occupied to visit. However, the VOC welcomed Masatsuna and Hoshu¯, together, for dinner.207 No visit by Kiyoshi is recorded. Truly amazingly – and this had never before been noticed – Satake Yoshiatsu, daimyo of Akita, made an appearance at the Nagasaki House. Yoshiatsu had been introduced to Western studies by Hiraga Gennai a dozen years before, and had become one of its main sponsors, as well as being a fine Western-style painter in his own right, under the studio name ‘Shozan’; he had also written Japan’s first treatises on Western art. Yoshiatsu had been known by repute to the VOC (though not personally) as possessor of Japan’s prime copper mines, and consequently, as Crans put it, already in 1760 ‘one of the greatest and most powerful lords of the Japanese empire’.208 But Yoshiatsu died within a week of this encounter, aged thirty-seven, obliterating a potential florescence of East–West relations.209 The next year, 1786, Van Reede went to Edo with physician Johan Falcke and scribe Coenraad Jonas; he again extended the same hospitality to Masatsuna and Hoshu¯, who came together and ‘left highly satisfied at one o’clock in the morning’; three days later, Van Reede received a visit from Kiyoshi, made in secret (apparently his preferred mode); the following week Masatsuna was back for dinner; again, Shigehide could not find the time to come, but sent regrets.210 In 1786, this court trip group had another significant encounter: in Osaka, while viewing the copper monopoly, as they often did, they met O¯ tsuki Gentaku, the pioneer scholar, who was in merry spirits, having come from a slap-up lunch with the city’s wealthiest and broadest collector and amateur, Kimura Kenkado¯; Gentaku was returning from Nagasaki, where he had spent some seven months studying (although oddly there is no record of his meeting any of the VOC there), and once home he enthused on his encounter in Osaka to Masashige, who, as we have seen, was his sponsor, and whom Gentaku at once met on his return to Edo; Masashige wrote an elegant note to Van Reede, thanking him for his kindness to the promising young doctor.211 The VOC stayed in Osaka, as in Miyako, only a short while, but they met the same figures every year, such as the landlord of their inn (also called the Nagasaki House) and the staff of the copper monopoly, so bonds could be built up. It helped that the landlord of the inn, Tamegawa Tatsukichi, was concurrently a senior monopoly official.212 Titsingh left no remarks on any of these Osaka men, but Van Reede was close enough to the monopoly’s master, Izumiya Kichibei, to give him a copy of Gerard van Loon’s important four-volume numismatic study of 1723–31, Beschrijving der Nederlandschen historipenningen (Description of historical Netherlandish coinage), bestowing it in 1789, when Kichibei went into retire- ment.213 Shigehide was always busy and Kiyoshi had his secrecy obsession, but receiving Masatsuna and Hoshu¯ for dinner became a habit for the VOC in Edo. In 1787, Romberg again, with physician Jan Loth, scribe Jean-Baptist Ricard, and translators Introduction 53 Ko¯saku and Einoshin, had them over, both guests leaving, ‘late at night, highly satisfied’, after which both dropped by ‘daily’.214 Hoshu¯’s brother, Morishima Chu¯ryo¯ was then completing the manuscript of his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, and he heard Ricard’s words on homosexuality, and inserted them; much of the information in the book had been relayed to Chu¯ryo¯ by Hoshu¯ over many court trips: Romberg is cited four times, Fredrik Schindeler (who went with Feith and Thunberg) thrice, Feith twice, Van Reede, Jonas, Thunberg and of course Ricard, once each.215 Another multiple link is manifested in the pages of Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa. It is stated that Masatsuna received from Romberg a Dutch print imported ‘last Autumn’ (sic, must mean summer), 1786, illustrating a sensational new invention, the talk of Europe – the hot-air balloon. The Montgolfier brothers had sent up their unmanned balloon, as is well known, from the Bois de Boulogne, on 21 November 1783. Shortly afterwards, the first manned ascent had taken place, with two young French aristocrats ascending, and within a few days, that same December, Jacques Charles, with Nöel Robert, improved the design and Charles ascended alone, from the Tuilleries, and flew 50 km in his ‘charlière’ – almost twenty times as far as the ‘montgolfière’ had managed.216 Masatsuna’s print is lost, but he permitted Chu¯ryo¯ to copy it for publication in his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, with a long discussion of the ascents, which is, however, garbled, having ‘Tuilleries’ as the French name for the balloon, Montgolfier the name of the inventor, and Charles and Robert the manufacturers.217 Chru¯ryo¯’s transcription does not inspire confidence that he had looked very carefully at the original print (see Figure 21). Despite the recent resignation of Okitsugu, enthusiasm for Europe had evidently not abated; indeed, it seems to have increased. In Edo, Romberg recorded, ‘I am spending my time as a schoolteacher, which I do not find enjoyable.’218 Masatsuna rather overdid things by sending his twenty-year-old son, Mototsuna, for intensive private coaching in the Dutch language. On this court trip the VOC finally met Shigehide, though initially only by chance, when they ran into him in the street, ‘on foot, dressed as a servant’, surely spying, his staff following at a discrete distance; when Shigehide recognised Romberg, he came in from the cold and greeted him, calling out in not entirely correct Dutch, ‘Romberg, ik heb je in lang niet gezien’ (Romberg, I haven’t seen you for ages’).219 Ten days later, Shigehide came to Nagasaki House, where he stayed for three hours, and left regretting he could not stay longer. Just weeks after this, Matsudaira Sadanobu took control of the Council of Elders. This year, 1787, marked the beginning of the end. When Van Reede arrived the following spring, with physician Johan Stutze (like Thunberg, a Swede) Jonas, Motojiro¯ and Einoshin, he found a distinct change. Masatsuna came to dinner, and stayed until 1 am, but without Hoshu¯, who was under government censure for what was now regarded as an indecently rakish lifestyle.220 Van Reede was told to expect a visit from Shigehide, but it would have to be incognito, even though Shigehide had retired in favour of his son, Narinobu, and ought to have had freer time. Anyway, he cancelled at short notice – the shogun’s own future father-in-law (the marriage to Tadako would be finally concluded just months later) being told he was ‘not allowed’ to go.221 Van Reede was furious to learn that this was the 54 Introduction

Figure 21 Anon. (Morishima Chu¯ryo¯?), ‘Luftschip’, from his Ko¯mo¯ zatsuwa, monochrome printed book illustration; 1787. Tokyo: National Diet Library. translators’ fault, since, in their ‘imprudence and ignorance’, they had blurted out the impending secret visit; Shigehide was also ‘very bitter and incensed’. This would have been the end of a career, at any rate for Motojiro¯, the senior partner, but nature stepped in, and he died shortly after return to Nagasaki, aged about thirty- five; this allowed the gregarious and gin-soaked Ju¯bei, ‘who had been passed over twice in the past but is in favour with the new governor’, to be moved up to the post of senior interpreter, in which, of course, he did not last long.222 Introduction 55 The curtain finally came down during the next court trip, in 1789. Romberg, Loth and temporary scribe Jan Stave arrived, with translators Ko¯saku and a new name from the college, Kafuku Yasujiro¯. Masatsuna and Hoshu¯ did not visit, and when Shigemasa attempted to do so, even incognito and without a word being breathed about it, he was ‘turned back’; ‘nor’, Romberg wrote, ‘does any other even dare the risk of sending his attendants’. Conviviality at the Nagasaki House had come to an end. ‘I was very sorry’, Romberg went on, ‘but I have to resign myself to it.’223 In 1790, Romberg was again in Edo (following Titsingh’s and the earlier precedent, Van Reede had returned only for the trading season in 1789, and handed back to Romberg in the autumn), with physician Johannes Schel, scribe Samuel Bernard and Einoshin and Nakayama Sakusaburo¯ (also a new name, though a junior interpreter since 1782). They received no visits of any kind, but sensed spies everywhere, thanks to the policies of ‘the feared and hated counsellor Etchu¯-no- kami’, that is, Matsudaira Sadanobu.224 This was the last annual court trip. Thereafter, the VOC was told to come only once every five years, which was a financial saving for the Company, but which sundered existing friendship networks and precluded the formation of new ones.

Titsingh after Japan In early 1785, Titsingh set foot back in Batavia. After a few months, he was nominated as the head of the VOC factory at Chinsura, in ; indeed, it may have been that this was already contemplated and accounts for his shortened third term in Nagasaki. The Chinsura factory, known as Fort Gustavia, was a pleasant spot, some 30 km up the River Hougly (modern Bhagirathi) from Calcutta, not far from the still-struggling French and Danish factories, and the dominant English one. Fort Gustavia was newer than Dejima, having been founded in 1653, but it had a better track-record, and was a far more congenial posting. The war with Great Britain was over, but British expansion was damaging the VOC – and other continental trading consortia: the Austrian Company (operating out of Ostend) had long since been dissolved under British pressure, and the Swedish East India Company, moribund from 1766, finally disappeared in 1784, with the French Company following it into extinction in 1790.225 It was Titsingh’s role to negotiate diplomatically with the British, and to re-establish the factory that they had previously occupied and only just released, and to keep the VOC presence in India afloat. (Fort Gustavia was lost to the British again during the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1824 the Dutch withdrew from India altogether, swapping their possessions there for the British ones in Sumatra.) But in the short term, the new post promised to be very good for Titsingh financially. Improvements in European copper undermined Japanese exports (which were dwindling anyway) and weakened the whole balance of inter-Asian VOC circulation of goods. Tens of thousands of tonnes of European copper were now entering India, and, as a contemporary of Titsingh wrote to the Gentlemen XVII, ‘going into an India weaving village with only Japanese copper to offer’ is next to useless.226 Titsingh had little to import to India. 56 Introduction In Chinsura, the VOC’s principal export was not cloth but opium. There was plenty of it, but supplies were interfered with by the British, whose governor- general, Lord Cornwallis (of American War of Independence fame), arriving at the same time as Titsingh to replace the more conciliatory Warren Hastings, began to force the VOC to buy via the English Company, and limit them to 700 chests annually. These charges hurt the VOC, but also left Titsingh with drastically less personal profit than had been promised.227 His predecessor, Johannes Ross, had made half a million rupees, but Titsingh was to garner only half that.228 Titsingh soon wrote to Batavia to recommend a strategic reduction of the VOC in Bengal, but the British did not wish to drive the Dutch out totally, as the VOC was the most efficient way for them to send private money home undetected.229 In 1788, Titsingh was raised to Supernumerary Counsellor (raad extraordinaris) of India. But the low ebb of VOC prestige on the subcontinent came the next year with the Antonetta Incident. A British captain who had bought the freedom of the city of Flushing, in the United Provinces, sailed into Bengal with a Dutch flag on his British ship (the word ‘London’ still visible under a quick paint job on the stern), came up the Hougly and, in defiance of the VOC monopoly for Dutch-flagged vessels, on the grounds that he was a British subject, began to trade. The British were unhappy but could do nothing to a Dutch-registered ship; Titsingh was livid and had the Antonetta seized, only to be told by Cornwallis that this was illegal, which forced him into a humiliating climb-down.230 Although he stayed seven years in India, Titsingh wrote to a friend, ‘I can not accustom me with this country’; his love remained for Japan.231 He wanted to leave as soon as permitted. If business and politics were frustrating, at least Titsingh’s social life was better. The rogue and gambler William Hickey laid on excellent parties, and noted that Titsingh ‘could literally drink gin like water’; once when Hickey invited him and his colleagues to dinner, ‘the mynheers did complete justice to the champagne and burgundy I gave them’.232 Titsingh lived with an Indian woman, whose name is not known, but by whom he fathered his only child, William, whom he would take back to Europe. Titsingh’s intellectual life became more animated too. He had brought from Batavia two Chinese men (Japanese were still not permitted to travel overseas) to assist him with his translations and researches, and despite everything, he was on good terms with many of the British, not excluding Cornwallis. In general, Titsingh professed to find his British opposite numbers more exhilarating than his Dutch colleagues, and at least they were more diverse, British presence being a whole colonial apparatus, not just a factory. Many of the ideas that gov- erned the organisation of Titsingh’s book were formulated during his discussions with British officials such as Sir William Jones (a scholar and friend of Dr Johnson) and Sir Robert Chambers (from 1791, chief justice of Bengal). It was probably at this time that he acquired fluent English (though, said Hickey, always with ‘foreign accent and delivery’). The Dutch had formed an expatriate lecture club called the Bataviaasch Genootschap (Batavian Society), and the year before Titsingh’s arrival, the British had emulated this with of Bengal, founded by Jones and placed Introduction 57 under the patronage of Hastings; it promoted exactly the sort of research that interested Titsingh. Jones was supportive of Titsingh’s project, and asked him to publish on Japan in their society’s journal; he offered the view that Japan’s ‘pre- eminence among Eastern kingdoms’, was ‘analogous to that of Britain among the natives of the West’.233 His pleas to Titsingh to write were not answered, but then, Titsingh did not write much for the Dutch society’s journal either. Disastrously, in 1789, the Belvliet, bearing a ‘mass of Japanese manuscripts’ to Titsingh from his Edo and Nagasaki friends, was wrecked off Burma.234 In January 1792, a British ship arrived in Bengal with news that the VOC had gone bankrupt.235 This turned out to be premature, but until a corrective came through, Titsingh’s credit was nearly worthless. Two months later, he was recalled to Batavia. It was for his successor, three years on, to surrender Fort Gustavia for a second and final time, to the British. Back in Batavia, Titsingh was appalled at the collapse of the city’s former affluence. Many of the finest houses stood empty. But his own career countinued to rise. He was promoted to Ordinary Counsellor; he applied for, but did not get, the superintendency of the opium bureau; he was offered, but turned down, the presidency of the Bench of Magistrates. From late summer 1792, he worked as Receiver-General, regarded as a lucrative position. But Batavia was no longer a desirable place to be. Titsingh seems to have made no attempt to exchange letters with his Japanese friends, for all that he would have seen several sailings of ships to and from Nagasaki, and he later expressed annoyance at the ‘out of eye out of heart’ (sic) attitude of his erstwhile Japanese correspondents, though he might have been equally guilty.236 At New Year 1793, Titsingh’s contract with the VOC expired. As one of his biographers wrote, he decided to leave ‘the sinking ship in Asia for the gathering storm of Europe’, and determined to live in London, imagining a life of literary symposia, such as he had witnessed in Bengal, but without the attendant worries.237 But while he was still in Batavia, Lord Macartney arrived, with the Lion and the Hindoostan, making a stop on the way to as first British ambassador to China. Because he spoke English, Titsingh was deputed to assist. He was convinced that the embassy was a scouting party to prepare ‘for their invasion of China’.238 Some months later, the head of the VOC’s Canton factory, Andreas van Braam Houckgeest, proposed that rather than fuming at British arrogance, the Dutch should emulate it. He pointed out that 1796 would be sixtieth anniversary of the reign of the Chinese huangdi (emperor) Gaozong (posthumously, Qianglong), and a congratulatory mission would be well received. To add weight to this idea, Van Braam stated that Britain, France and Spain would be sending ambassadors to the jubilee – though he had just made this up. Van Braam was a mercurial character. He had arrived in China in 1767, and stayed eight years before returning to the United Provinces, very rich. After nearly a decade, in 1783, he emigrated to South Carolina, and the following year became an American citizen. But sadly his children died in an epidemic, which propelled him back to China, where he arrived in 1788 to take up the post of Canton factory chief.239 58 Introduction Of course, Van Braam intended that he should be nominated as ambassador to China. But he was made only Second, with the senior post given to Titsingh, who deferred return to Europe. (Van Braam has a kind of revenge, for one of the most recent books on the subject unaccountably claims the embassy was ‘under the leadership of van Braam’.240) Revolutionary turmoil in Europe meant the VOC embassy was organised in Batavia, without reference to the Gentlemen XVII, much less than to the Dutch state, and so was a kind of trick played on the Chinese court. When Titsingh discovered he too had been tricked by Van Braam’s monstrous fib about the other European powers planning delegations, he attempted to cancel the embassy, but as Beijing had been informed, this could hardly be done.241 Not for nothing did Titsingh ever after regard Van Braam as ‘untrustworthy behind his mask of honesty’.242 Titsingh left Batavia as ‘Dutch Ambassador to China’, in summer, 1794, aboard the Siam; he stopped in Canton to pick up Van Braam and also Chrétien-Louis- Joseph de Guignes, son of the distinguished Parisian Asianist, Joseph de Guignes (with whom Titsingh was in correspondence), who spoke Chinese and was enlisted to assist the native-speaker interpreters. In total, twenty-seven Europeans and a rather larger number of Chinese set out; Titsingh became the first Freemason ever to set foot in China.243 They took a local boat to Nanzhang, then went overland to the capital. It was mid-winter, planned so they would arrive for the lunar New Year, but the weather made conditions gruelling. Van Braam lost 8 cm off his generous waistline; one of the Malay servants, Apollo, ‘a strong, robust boy’, died of exposure and fatigue; on arrival, Titsingh was confined to bed for several days.244 The presents destined for the court had not fared better: ‘two magnificent mechanical pieces’ were smashed – and only one could be repaired by the Swiss clockmaker they had prudently taken along from Macartney’s entourage.245 Not only did the embassy borrow, without permission, the sovereign title of the Dutch state, but as the United Provinces was a republic, a concept deemed not to be understandable to the Chinese, the group pretended their stadtholder, William V, was ‘king of Holland’, and Titsingh tendered to the Qing court a letter purporting to be from him, but which was not so at all. Yet the jubilee was a lavish and spectacular sight to see, and as, in the end, the Dutch were the only European delegation (though there were embassies from , Tibet, Tonkin, the Ryukyus and other Asian states), they were warmly welcomed; Titsingh was personally received by the huangdi, whom he thought ‘though advanced in years’, had a ‘good and kind appearance’.246 Van Braam later published a picture of this reception, though it is fictionalised (see Figure 22). The huangdi was impressed by the Dutch, and gave Titsingh and Van Braam 150 taels of silver each.247 A French Jesuit resident in Beijing, Jean-Joseph de Grammont, noted, however, that although the court was pleased, the Dutch embassy was a silly idea fundamentally, for with

Figure 22 (opposite) Anon., from André van Braam Houckgeest, An Authentic Account of the Dutch Embassy to the Court of the Emperor of China, copperplate book illustration; 1798. London: The British Library.

60 Introduction so much else going on, its splash was less than it could have been at any other time; moreover, the use of Cantonese interpreters lowered the tone, and (although this was not the VOC’s fault) their Beijing chargé was ‘a proud enemy of the Europeans, without humanity or decency’, who failed to let the Dutch capitalise on anything, and whose behaviour was so deplorable he was sacked within days of their party leaving the city.248 The group arrived back in Canton in May, after some five months away. Titsingh was perhaps the only European ever to have met the shogun of Japan and the huangdi of China. Van Braam returned to the United States, purchased a large estate near Philadelphia, named it the China Retreat, and rode about with a Chinese driver and footman. The three top Europeans had kept journals, and Van Braam and de Guignes soon published theirs. Van Braam’s, which included the picture of the reception, was published in English, in 1798, then translated into German, in 1798–99, and Dutch, in 1804–06, all dedicated to George Washington; it misspells Titsingh’s name throughout.249 De Guignes’s book appeared only in French, in 1808, and in it he unilaterally upgraded himself from interpreter to ‘ambassadorial private secretary’.250 Characteristically, Titsingh failed to publish his journal. He felt jaded by the embassy anyway, and after Japan, was unimpressed by the ‘coarseness and lack of civilisation’ of the Chinese, even at their court, and he lamented how he had expected ‘a very civilised and enlightened people’ from the reports ‘with which the missionaries have deluded the world for a number of years’, but had not found one.251 It was time for Titsingh to leave Asia. Still in Canton, he learned that never mind there being no ‘king of Holland’, there was no United Provinces either. In 1795, the French army had invaded and annexed the country, renaming it the . The solution was to revive his plans for London. Since Dutch shipping had evaporated, he sent out his son, William, on a Swedish vessel, in January 1796, insisting at first (but later relenting) that the boy use an assumed name to hide his illigitimacy.252 Titsingh himself sailed that March aboard a British ship, the Cirencester (pronounced ‘sissister’), his baggage, at ten vast trunks, so voluminous he was charged £300 extra.253 The presents received from the huangdi and intended for the ‘king of Holland’ had nowhere to go, so Titsingh kept the half that Van Braam had not taken, but afraid the British would seize this trove (on the correct grounds that William V, though not king, was head of the Dutch state, whose annihilation Great Britain did not recognise, and who, in exile in the London suburb of Kew, had written a Circular Letter, placing all Dutch overseas territories, ports and property in British trust).254 Titsingh, therefore, sent the most fabulous part of his cargo in the vessel of another neutral country, using the Spanish Purissima Conception. The Cirencester made European landfall in late November 1796, but in Ireland, owing to heavy weather. There, Titsingh heard that Britain was now at war with Spain. Worse, he was informed that the British had actually seized the Purissima Conception. As soon as he was able, he wrote to the capturing British admiral, Sir John Jervis, asking for release of the goods.255 The letter went unanswered, and nothing was heard of the ambassadorial cargo again. Introduction 61 Titsingh in Europe When the Cirencester finally arrived in England, shortly before Christmas, Titsingh went straight to London, taking rooms at the Lothian Hotel in Mayfair. His Bengal-era friends secured him the assistance of the English East India Company, which stored his trunks in their offices in Leadenhall Street. The conditions in the Netherlands, and of the VOC, depressed him, and he also found London ‘far too expensive’.256 He soon became unwell, perhaps additionally overwhelmed by the vastness of the project he had set himself, and which he could no longer delay – the writing of his book. He was persuaded to try Bath, an elegant and fashionable spa, and he moved there in February, after only weeks in the capital. His house, No. 12, North Parade, still stands. Titsingh returned to London occasionally, and he sought to obtain an audience with William V, but failed.257 But Titsingh was introduced to Sir Joseph Banks, former scientist with Captain Cook, president of the Royal Society and a trustee of the British Museum. Two decades before, Banks had befriended Thunberg on his return from Japan, and had also organised his election to the Royal Society; he secured the same for Titsingh. Thunberg’s massive Travels in Europe, Africa and Asia, with its large section on Japan, was now out in Swedish, German, French and English (to accompany his Latin Flora Japonica) and in 1794 he had added to these tomes a fine picture album of Japanese plants, Icones plantarum japonicarum thunbergii (Thunberg’s illustrated plants of Japan). Banks owned all these, probably receiving complimentary copies from Thunberg, and he could not have failed to discuss them with Titsingh.258 But Titsingh pretended to the last that Thunberg did not exist. For his part, Thunberg ignored Titsingh too. In thanks for his encouragement, Titsingh donated to Banks the collection of minerals that he had received from Hoshu¯. He took great umbrage when Sir Charles Blagden, the Scottish army doctor whose friendship with Banks had secured him the secretaryship of the Royal Society, pooh-poohed many of the items as European objects fraudulently inserted; ‘What I can assert’, Titsingh wrote to Banks, ‘is that during my stay in Edo, in 1782, this collection was offered to me by Katsragwa Hozuid’, and, he added fulsomely, ‘I have taken the liberty to offer it to you, as of a feeble testimony, and from the full conviction that if it contain any thing of notice, it could never find a more deserving possessor.’259 Through Banks, Titsingh also met William Marsden, an expert on Malaya (modern Malaysia), who had worked for the English East India Company on Sumatra, returning with a fine collection in 1779; he held the post of secretary to the British Museum, which he had taken over from Thunberg’s old fellow- student under Linnaeus in Sweden, Daniel Solander. Through Marsden, who was also secretary to the Admiralty, Titsingh met its First Lord, the Earl Spencer, late home secretary, and another cache of powerful figures. In 1799, Van Braam sold up his China Retreat and came to London, where he auctioned his Chinese collection at Christies.260 He and Titsingh preferred not to meet. 62 Introduction After four years of collating and writing, in 1800, Titsingh decided to visit the Netherlands. He hoped to see his relations in Amsterdam, and have William declared legitimate. It had also become possible for him to obtain his outstanding wages from the now truly bankrupt and disbanded VOC (these amounted to over f 35,000).261 He was back in London in 1801, but encountered such horrendous visa difficulties, owing to the situation of the Batavian Republic being occupied by Napoleonic troops, and so, de facto, a part of France, a country with which Great Britain was at war, that he crossed right back and went to Paris, where he settled. Titsingh never came to England again, ‘the remembrance of the treatment I have meet [sic] with in 1801 at the Allien [sic] Office is too lasting’, he told his friends.262 His baggage was sent over, arriving in Paris in the autumn of 1802, which allowed him to continue his work. In 1803, Titsingh made a donation of books to the Bibliothèque impériale (modern Bibliothèque nationale), including the core encyclopaedia Wakan sansai zue (Sino-Japanese illustrated encyclopaedia of the three levels of existence), originally published in China, but reissued in Japan with notations for local readers in 1712; he also gave the core history, Dai-nihon shi (History of Japan), which had been begun under the aegis of Tokugawa Mitsukuni, the daimyo of Mito, in 1657, and was still in progress. The Bibliothèque’s director, Jean-Augustin Capperonnier, wrote to express his thanks for this acquisition of the library’s first books ‘in the ’, though in fact both texts are in pseudo-Chinese kanbun.263 In 1806, Titsingh moved with William into a newly built apartment in the rue Napoléon (now rue de la Paix). Chained to his desk, as he put it, out of ‘shame for inactivity of so many years’, Titsingh’s life was no longer very social.264 It was already a decade since he had returned to Europe and over twenty since he had left Japan, and next to nothing was done. He re-established contact with de Guignes the younger (the elder was deceased) and met Louis-Matthieu Langlès, precocious Persian expert at the Bibliothèque, but annoyingly for Titsingh, French translator of Thunberg’s travel book, and a bit of a fan.265 More important for Titsingh’s project was his meeting with Jean-Pierre-Abel Rémusat, mentioned above, first professor of Chinese at the Collège de France; Rémusat was a prickly character, not entirely at ease with someone who had actually been to China and met the huangdi, and he alternated between support and superciliousness; he also massaged his name into the more aristocratic-looking Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat. But it was this scholar who, in the end, ensured the survival of Titsingh’s project. William attended the Ecole de Marine and, in 1810, graduated and sailed to Asia on a Prussian warship, intending to get to Japan. Titsingh enjoined him to ‘have a glass with my surviving friends’, though there were none.266 The next year, William landed in Batavia, but as it was in now a British possession, both he and the Prussian staff were taken as prisoners of war, in which condition they were unceremoniously shipped back to London, only at which point could William prove he was a Dutchman, and secure his liberty. He returned to Paris, arriving in 1812, to find his father dead. Introduction 63 Titsingh’s Magnum Opus: the sources Titsingh wrote that while in Japan he had collected ‘sufficient stock of material to pass the remainder of my life usefully and with pleasure, putting them to order’.267 This was an understatement. He never fully marshalled the materials. Titsingh tormented himself about this. His papers moved about his desk; his collection of artefacts, which he referred to as the Titsingh Cabinet, sat in boxes. By his own admission, he was looked on as a misanthrope, so single-mindedly did he devote himself to the translations, which did not swiftly advance. He ignored the world outside and did not read a newspaper ‘for upwards of three years’.268 Titsingh turned to wistful musing on Japan. This was an alternative to writing, editing and translating. He made comments to the effect that it was, ‘the most beautiful and agreeable country in the known world, and the best civilised’, and so on.269 A senior VOC official remarked, with some surprise given the life actually led on Dejima, that ‘factory chief Titsingh, a man of advanced years’, declared ‘he had spent his most enjoyable days in Japan’.270 Titsingh was not idle, but he was just not a finisher. His sense of responsibility with regard to putting know- ledge of Japan into the public domain, for the first time, properly, was debilitating. His belief that ‘it is a fact, no body exists in Europe but me, who can give such an ample and faithful detail’, was not only rather breathtaking (Thunberg, for one, might have begged to differ), but ultimately self-defeating.271 By the time of his death, Titsingh had produced, but not published, a quite large body of translated materials. Questions of which and how many books Titsingh relied on, and of how accurately he translated them, have never before been asked, but they must be addressed. What follows takes the first ever steps in adjudicating such issues. Books on modern history, or on anything that might impinge on the sacral dignity of the shogunate and its forebears, could not be published in Japan. Abel Rémusat (to use his preferred double-barrelled name) noted that if Titsingh’s manu- scripts ever went to press, ‘by an extraordinary singularity, we shall be earlier and better informed than they concerning the events of their own history’.272 The shogunate, however, did tolerate the circulation of such materials in manuscript form, and such documents were Titsingh’s main sources. There is thus a major division in Edo-period writings between printed books (hanpon) and manuscript books (shahon). Each has its own characteristics, but it cannot be asserted that the former circulated more widely than the latter, and it sometimes might have been the reverse: hand copies were made continuously, while a print- run could sell out; naturally, a printed book could be hand-copied too. In addition to diffusion is the matter of standardisation. Printed books, though they could have variant impressions, are fixed in content, whereas manuscripts admit of scribal error, deliberate omission, substitution and insertion; well-known manuscript works are frequently quite diverse in content and can be divided into ‘families’. A third issue is readability. Block type was little used in Japan, and printed texts were calligraphed on paper, transferred to woodblock, then printed a page at a time, but still, print was, on the whole, easier to read than handwriting. Thus, all in all, 64 Introduction Titsingh had an exceedingly difficult task. It may never be known how he selected the sources that he used, though it is most likely that they were chosen for him by Nagasaki or Edo friends, and so represent a good cross-section of what was thought important to informed late eighteenth-century Japanese. As for Titsingh’s language ability, the doctor Tachibana Nankei, using reported information (probably supplied by Yoshio Ko¯saku, when they met in his Dutch rooms) stated that Titsingh praised Chinese characters (in which Japanese is partly written) as ‘very useful for scholarship because they are so precise’, and Nankei was told that, ‘little by little [Titsingh] became able to write in characters and even to read kanbun books, with considerable fluency’.273 Some have trusted this. But it is not a tenable claim. Kanbun Titsingh certainly could not read, though he learned some individual Chinese characters. Therefore, he chose sensibly, or had chosen sensibly for him books in a more anecdotal type of history writing, composed in the vernacular. Most, though not all, of these fit into the colourful genre known as jitsuroku, literally ‘true records’, but belying their name, they stress emotional involvement, motivation and excitement, garrulous, blood-soaked and tear-jerking by turns; they overlap as much with fiction and drama as with veritable history. Some texts can be attributed to specific authors through other sources, but just as very few jitsuroku authors dared to publish, most also left their names off their manuscripts, for safety’s sake, as their prying discussions of those in power put them at the very margins of legality. When encountered by Whig historians in Europe, the narrative content of jitsuroku seemed to be detached from real historical events. An early French reader objected this was ‘not proper history at all’, and if such narratives were what constituted the Japanese past, then ‘their history is a tissue of horrors and atro- cities’.274 But with the Whig interpretation of history now gone, the anecdotal nature of much of Titsingh’s contents will, I hope, reversedly, endear them to the reader. The concept of ‘secret memoirs’ is no longer antithetical to that of ‘proper history’. Much of what Titsingh collated offers a totally new, and distinctly more vibrant view of figures who, too often, appear in established records in only leaden guise, later Japanese historiography having also succumbed to Whig inter- pretations. Titsingh did also use more formal sources too, as will be seen. The first dilemma for Titsingh, in constructing his book, was to establish a chronology. Japanese books, of course, used the Japanese system of era names, not Anno Domini years. Today, concordances are available, but it was not so then. Also, the lunar year began and ended about six weeks later than the Western one, so overlaps were never total. Lunar months were, accordingly, disaligned from their European equivalents, such that, for example, September and the ninth lunar month would share no days in common with each other. By dint of much labour, Titsingh did manage to harmonise the years, but the months eluded him. In his text, where he writes, say, September, he actually means the ninth lunar month, though often, in keeping with the VOC practice, he wisely left the month in Japanese, giving, say, a day in kugatsu (the ninth lunar month), and not attempting to position it with anything in the solar calendar. This was not perfect, but Titsingh was satisfied enough with the result, and he wrote to Masatsuna that, Introduction 65 ‘with unbelievable difficulty I have reconciled the Chinese and Japanese system of time measurement with ours, and filled in all the significant events in Japanese history’.275 Titsingh identified, at various point in his drafts, nine specific Japanese sources from which he derived his ‘significant events’. Romanisation of Japanese was not yet standardised (witness his spelling of Katsuragawa Hoshu¯’s name), and this has left some scholars bemused as to what books he was referring to. His nine named Japanese sources are here all introduced and defined for the first time. They range from well-worn works that are still consulted today (though more by historians of drama and fiction than of politics), sometimes available in modern printed editions, to the totally obscure. These cannot be the full range of Titsingh’s sources, since he includes information that is not found in any of them. Further, the parts of his chronicle that post-date his departure from Japan are not translations, but are from oral accounts or correspondence with his Japanese friends or VOC colleagues. Repeatedly, Titsingh mentions Nipon-o-day-tche-lan or, in current romanisation, Nihon o¯dai ichiran (Table of the rulers of Japan).276 Its translation was intended as the basis of his section on the history of the dairis. The Table was compiled in 1650 by Hayashi Gaho¯, son of the famous Hayashi Razan, who had formulated a Shintoised Confucianism early in the Edo Period, and, in 1607, had become political advisor to the second shogun, , and then rector of Edo’s Confucian academy, the Sho¯heiko¯. Gaho¯ was also a noted scholar, though in 1650 he was just thirty-three. He did not continue the Table up to the present, again, in deference to the regime, but terminated it at the last pre-Tokugawa ruler. The work was published, though only later, in 1663 (it was reissued in 1803), perhaps because it was a necessary reference work for officials, and did not evaluate, but merely listed rulers (it is no jitsuroku). It is a dry affair, and Titsingh acknowledged that translating it was ‘a most tedious task’.277 In the end, the Table was excised from the posthumous version of Titsingh’s book, although it was eventually published separately, by a British press, though in French, in 1834, under the title of Annales des empereurs du japon. It does not figure in the present edition. Gaho¯’s Table was later unscrupulously pirated by , another well- known Confucian scholar, who, at the turn of the seventeenth century, served the fifth shogun, . He had then been retained by his son, Ienobu, and later been made preceptor to Ienobu’s son, Ietsuna. Hakuseki will be introduced immediately below.278 The second source is of a different ilk. Titsingh calls it Itokoua Sirik, which is a highly garbled version of Ho¯ka shiryaku (Brief history of currency), better known by the title of Honcho¯ho¯ka tsu¯yo¯ jiryaku (Short account of the circulation of currency in this realm) – this would not have been possible to trace had Titsingh not named its author, Arai Chikugo-no-kami, that is, Hakuseki himself.279 Titsingh dated the work to 1708, although it is otherwise thought to be from 1711; though minor, the difference is significant, since Ienobu acceded in 1709, and among the policies that Hakuseki sought to persuade the new shogun to adopt was a restoration of currency, several times debased, and this book was part of his ammunition to that end. Hakuseki’s contention was that currency, being made of 66 Introduction precious, or semi-precious metal, is finite and so must not be allowed to disappear overseas too casually; his was not a protectonist argument, for he wished to see international trade conducted, but in the form of credit, or barter. By Titsingh’s time, this is indeed how it was done. The VOC was strictly debarred from taking out Japanese coin, and it was illegal for Japanese to pay them for imports in it. Hori Monju¯ro¯ was dismissed for the offence of buying his European clock in cash, not for buying it as such.280 Because of Hakuseki’s fame, the book has been published fairly often, but only in modern times, never in the Edo Period when it circulated in manuscript.281 It is worth noting in passing some other books by Hakuseki, though unknown to Titsingh: in 1709, he wrote Sairan igen (Collected views and strange words), a treatise on Europe, derived from interviews with an imprisoned Italian priest, and he expanded this, probably in 1715, with Seiyo¯ kibun (Record of things heard from the West). Between these two, in 1712, he produced his real historical study, Tokushi yoron (Treatise on history). Though again none was published until modern times, all were hugely influential as manuscript books; the last work has recently been put into English.282 Titsingh’s third source was Keïzan-dai-feki, or romanised in the modern way, taiheiki (Record of the great pacification of the Keian period); ‘keian’ is the era 1648–51, while ‘record of the great pacification’ refers to a hugely important fourteenth-century chronicle on the establishment of the first, or Kamakura, sho- gunate in 1192. This book is a jitsuroku detailing an important incident known as the Keian Disturbance (keian so¯do¯), in which the , half a century in power, was subjected to its most severe early challenge. Some 4,000 rebels attacked Edo, and very nearly overthrew the regime, under the leadership of Tachibana Sho¯setsu, said in the text to be empowered by magic (genjutsu); Sho¯setsu was from Yui, a town in Suruga, not far from Edo, and Titsingh’s trans- lation, following the source, calls him Yui Sho¯setsu or Yui no (= genitive particle) Sho¯setsu. Sho¯setsu’s chief accomplice was Marubashi Chu¯ya, an itinerant military strategist. The text is extant in some twenty manuscript versions, so it cannot have been particularly rare while Titsingh was in Japan; not all copies are dated, but the earliest is from 1753, though the text may be considerably older.283 In 1780, the story was recycled as a play, Go taikeiki hakuseki-banashi (The great pacification as a game of go: a tale of the white pieces). So effective was shogunal censoring of writing on current affairs that other than through these two versions next to nothing is known of the disturbance. The jitsuroku was finally published in 1929.284 His fourth source is referred to by him as Ken-day gen-pi-rok, seemingly, Kindai genpiroku (Modern top-secret records), but no such book exists. The source has not until now been correctly identified, but it can be traced.285 Titsingh abbreviated the title from Kindai ko¯jitsu genpiroku (Top-secret record of public affairs of recent generations) of 1754, which forms a pair with Kinsei ko¯jitsu genpiroku (Top-secret record of public affairs of modern times), of the following year, of similar content. Both are jitsurokus, but of wide scope, covering anecdotes about the reigns of the seventh and eighth shoguns, Tokugawa Ietsugu and Yoshimune, plus that portion Introduction 67 of the reign of the ninth, Ieshige, that occurred during Yoshimune’s retirement. Its chronological sweep is therefore from 1713 to 1751, bringing it extremely close to the time of composition. Its author is known – Baba Bunko¯. Titsingh was not aware of this authorship, although he had heard of Bunko¯ and cites him (see below), though mistakenly breaking his name into Bababun Ko¯). Little is known of Bunko¯. Some said he was a laicised monk, others a disaffected shogunal administrator.286 All confirmed that he was an excellent raconteur, and from the mid-1750s he laid on paying recitations at the home of one Bunzo¯, in the very centre of Edo, to which up to 200 listeners would come. The proprietor of a local paying library (kashihon- ya), one Eizo¯, being swift of brush and good of memory, wrote up the content of Bunko¯’s recitations, and these circulated widely (in manuscript); perhaps Bunko¯ himself wrote down versions too. Either way, Bunko¯ was dangerously exposed. In 1758, at the age of forty-one, he was executed by the shogunate for lese-majesty (the only litterateur ever to be so); his pupil, Buncho¯, was exiled to the provinces and Eizo¯ was foced to relocate his business.287 Most of Bunko¯’s work was recalled and incinerated, though seventeen titles by him are known, with the one that Titsingh used his second effort, chronologically; some twenty manuscript copies of it are extant, suggesting it remained in circulation. The Kindai ko¯jitsu genpiroku was published, with its pair, in 1892.288 As his fifth source, Titsingh mentions Giofirok, which sounds like Kyo¯ hiroku, but which cannot be identified; hiroko means ‘secret records’, but kyo¯ has many meanings. It is clearly also a work in the jitsuroku genre, and Titsingh states it is by Bunko¯, though no such title by him is attested. Titsingh also states that it sup- plies information on the reign of the ninth shogun, Ieshige, or 1745–60, although the anecdotes derived are oddly interlaced with retrospective comments on the third shogun, Iemitsu. This whole matter seems to be confused, and perhaps Titsingh actually had a delectus from several sources. Since Titsingh never stated the source of his longest anecdote, which concerns the planned insurrection of Yamagawa Daini against the tenth shogun, Ieharu, on behalf of the dairi, it is possible that this text actually relates to that, which could then suggest that Kyo¯ hiroku would mean ‘secret records of [the city of] Kyo¯’ (i.e. Kyoto or Miyako); however, no book is known with that title (perhaps it was more totally suppressed), and even if it were, Bunko¯ could not be the author as he was long dead. Titsingh’s other four named sources relate to parts of his text excluded from the present edition, but they should, nevertheless, be briefly mentioned. The first provided material for most of his essay on Japanese coinage (Hakuseki did not write much on actual coins). Thunberg (who had smuggled onto Dejima a set of coins hidden in his shoes289) had included a long explanation of Japanese coins in his travel book, so Titsingh needed to outdo this. Titsingh noted for the record that he was the first to make a ‘complete’ collection of Japanese coins, an impossibility given their many and competing forms, but implying that Thunberg’s collection (on which he had delivered his inaugural lecture at Upsala) was not adequate.290 Titsingh refers to this source in two romanisations, either as Sin sen sen poe or Shin sen sen poe. It is not hard to unravel: Shinsen zenpu (Newly selected manual of numismatics) was written by Kutsuki Masatsuna himself and published in 1781; 68 Introduction Titsingh also referred to it in several letters, including those to Masatsuna himself, and to Ko¯saku.291 It was Masatsuna who gave Titsingh a copy, and, with unwonted alacrity, Titsingh at once began to translate, with a significant portion completed in a few months; however, his speed worked to his disadvantage, for Masatsuna recalled the run, having discovered some mistakes, and reissued a corrected version in 1782, obliging Titsingh to redo much of his work. Titsingh’s copy has been found in St Petersberg.292 The Shisen zenpu was published a third time, after Titsingh had left Japan, in 1790.293 The next two works were used by Titsingh for his treatise on marriage. The first, romanised as Jome tori tiofo ki, is Yometori cho¯ho¯-ki (Treasury for getting a wife), by Endo¯ Genkan, better known as a tea-master; it was probably pub- lished in 1697.294 It does not survive in many copies and was never reprinted, so was probably considered outdated by Titsingh’s time. Second is what he calls Kesi koukoro, which must be a shortened title and is not enough to trace it by. Fortunately, Abel Rémusat gave a fuller designation after he went through Titsingh’s papers, as Kourei-kesi fukouro, allowing identification as Konrei keshi-bukuro (Bag of poppies for marriage); this was a much-used, two-volume compendium on household lore by a certain Hakusui, who wrote three such books, but is otherwise unknown; it was first published in 1750, and again, after Titsingh’s departure, in 1795; Titsingh’s copy is now in the Vatican Library.295 For his accompanying section on funeral rites, Titsingh used a work that he did not name, but referred to as ‘two funeral ceremonies, explained for the instruction of youth’, which is unclear. Titsingh had two scrolls of funeral processions, one showing the obsequies of the Nagasaki governor, Toda Morinao, and identified as such, and the other showing that of a senior shogunal officer, unidentified, but probably of Takagi Sakuemon, whose cortege he has seen. Both scrolls were reproduced in the published version of his book, as has been mentioned above (see Figures 2 and 3). Finally there were two sources for the treatise on Ezo (Hokkaido). This treatise was not, in the end, published in the magnum opus, but separately, and in French only. One source is given as, ‘Iesso ki by Kannemon, of 1652’, that is, Ezo-ki (Record of Ezo) by Nakazawa Kan’emon; interestingly, it is not otherwise datable from Japanese sources. The book exists today only in the version edited by Arai Hakuseki, also undated and extremely rare but which was probably the form in which Titsingh had it. With this, Titsingh made available for the first time in Europe, elements of Ainu vocabulary, adding to Nakazawa and Hakuseki’s Ainu- Japanese equivalents the meanings of the words in French. Of his second source, Titsingh says it was composed by ‘the preceptor of the shogun Tsunayoshi’ in 1720; Tsunayoshi ruled from 1680 to 1709, dying in office; he had no known preceptor writing on this subject in 1720. Titsingh is surely confusing Tsunayoshi with his great-uncle, Ienobu, whose preceptor was, of course, Hakuseki. Titsingh refers to this source as Jesso ki (i.e. Ezo-ki), which does not match any book by Hakuseki, though he wrote five on Ezo, but it is surely a slip for Haruseki’s best- known work on the subject, Ezo-shi (Data on Ezo).296 It exists in many copies, was printed at the end of the Edo period, in 1862, and has several modern editions.297 Introduction 69 Titsingh’s Magnum Opus: the publication As the translating moved slowly on, various publishers made overtures to Titsingh. Thunberg’s book was selling, but there was space in the market for another offering on Japan. French and English versions ought to be eminently publishable, though it was emotionally hard for Titsingh to accept that, with the turmoil in the United Provinces, publication in his own language, the tongue of the once glorious VOC, was no longer an option; he wrote to the statesman and Arabist, Constantine- François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, that books in Dutch, ‘are either no more, or ill-researched, and there is room now only for novels and suchlike’.298 In 1809, Titsingh wrote again, this time to William Marsden, at the British Museum, sending a draft of his historical section on the lives of the shoguns, stating that he hoped to see it in print soon, and that he would like the English version to come out first, acidly noting that he would like the French version to be published in London too, ‘in order not to be exposed to the many vexations and impositions of that covetous sort of people’ – the French.299 Even so, Titsingh had put out feelers to a distinguished Parisian press, Nepveu, based in the rue des Panoramas and specialising in travel books. The patron, Auguste-Nicolas Nepveu, was positive, indicating he would take at least the two historical sections, which anyway were all that was approaching being ready.300 Titsingh specified that he wanted his forthcoming book to be dedicated to Kutsuki Masatsuna (unbeknownst to him already deceased), to which Nepveu raised no objection.301 By the time Titsingh died, aged sixty-seven. Nevpeu had not taken receipt of any of the manuscript, nor had anything beyond the partial draft been sent to London. In his will, Titsingh left his academic possessions to the British Museum, which surely delighted Marsden and Banks, but as Britain and France were at war, transfer was not possible. A rumour (repeated by scholars to this day, and though stemming from Titsingh himself, never proven) circulated that while in Bengal, Titsingh had been offered 2 lacs of rupees (£2000, or almost 1/2m francs) for his collection of texts and artefacts.302 The astounding comprehensiveness of the Titsingh Cabinet was amplified in another rumour, circulated by Nepveu (though denied by Abel Rémusat’s fellow-editor of Titsingh’s French manuscript, Klaproth) that Titsingh had spent fourteen years in Japan!303 French officials got wind of this and impounded Titsingh’s possessions. This might have been proceedually correct had they already become British possessions, since it would have been enemy property, but no transfer had yet been made. William challenged the seizure, and the papers, books and artefacts were relinquished into his hands, barring a small number of items withheld for the Bibliothèque. Titsingh had never made an inventory of his holdings, but a list was drawn up by Langlès and de Guigues, containing 169 objects.304 Abel Rémusat, now in negative mode, upon inspection of the whole, expressed disappointment at its quality and range.305 William had no use for these materials in the ‘Titsingh Cabinet’, and soon put a part of them up for auction. But as he held back the best pieces for future disposal, the sale did not arouse much attention. Nepveu attended, hoping to buy his promised manuscripts, but they were not among the lots, and all that did go under 70 Introduction the hammer, he lamented, were ‘ordinary things’.306 William squandered the proceeds, as he was doing all Titsingh’s legacy (said to be considerable).307 Not many months later, William was prevailed upon by Nepveu, with the help of Langlès, to part with all remaining items, which included most of the Japan materials, Titsingh’s letters, and the journal of his embassy to China.308 Nepveu’s acquisition of this, in 1814, was celebrated in an essay by Conrad de Malte-Brun, a widely published travel writer, and editor of the periodical, Annales des voyages de la géographie et de l’histoire; Malte-Brun not only repeated the canard that the British had tried to obtain the collection for a vast sum, but added for good measure that the Russians had sought it too, and yet concluded, ‘happily it remains in the hands of a Frenchman zealous for the national glory’, which it did, though not legally.309 Nepveu now had many interesting Japanese pictures and prints, but also a voluminous, three-language manuscript, probably in a much less advanced state than he had anticipated. Some of the more complete segments were hived off, such as the description of Ezo, which anyway Langlès had suggested to Titsingh to publish separately; Malte-Brun edited this for inclusion in his journal.310 It took Nepveu five years to put out a short book made up of Titsingh’s essays on marriages and funerals, and a few of the other snippets, but this must have sold, since later in the same year he reissued it, with illustrations, and this better version was reprinted within the year.311 The dozen-odd illustrations contained were also published as an album without text.312 It seemed that the market would bear more, so Abel Rémusat agreed to brush up all the rest of the manuscripts, in their French versions, for publication. Langlès lent encouragement, though having waded through translating Thunberg, which he had found extraordinarily trying in the later stages, he declined to get further involved.313 Abel Rémusat therefore engaged Heinrich von Klaproth, who had learned Chinese in the 1790s and acquired Japanese in 1804 from a native speaker (he had met one when he passed through Irkutsk, as a member of the Russian embassy to China); Klaproth was a professor, by appointment of Frederick William III of Prussia, but had the privilege of residing in Paris, not Berlin.314 Abel Rémusat and Klaproth sent the bulk of their edition of Titsingh to press in 1820, under the title of Mémoires et anecdotes sur la dynastie régnante des djogouns, as mentioned at the outset.315 Abel Rémusat was too proud to be thought collator of another man’s work, so he added notes of his own, and elucidations, many of which, however, cloud the issues concerned. But with a stake in the project’s success, he now praised Titsingh’s achievement highly, in public at least, saying Titsingh had managed, ‘as much as Kaempfer and much more than Thunberg’.316 The initial print run was a healthy 1,000 copies, and the edition sold out.317 It was reprinted the next year, twice in fact, once as it was, once with more critical apparatus and additional figures, and this itself was reprinted, again twice, in 1822. Surprisingly, given that he seems to have had a money-spinner, Nepveu went bankprupt, and there were no more French editions of the text. Having worked closely with Titsingh’s manuscript, both Abel Rémusat and Klaproth, in more recherché contexts, expressed doubts over the level of the Introduction 71 author’s grasp of what he was talking about. Of course they had their own agendas in claiming this. In a university paper, Abel Rémusat stated, ‘one is not to expect from him very exact translations, nor profound research’, and he condemned Titsingh’s ‘extremely incorrect style’. Neither did he believe Titsingh really knew Chinese characters, and this led him into ‘palpable error’, and overall he concluded that Titsingh’s knowledge was ‘pretty superficial’.318 Klaproth went further, averring that Titsingh knew ‘neither Chinese nor Japanese’, but relied solely on the Nagasaki translators, and specifically, he said, on Narabayashi Eizaemon and Yoshio Ko¯saku.319 Still, the English version now reissued in the present book was prepared, and it appeared in 1822, under the more succinct, though not entirely rational title of Illustrations of Japan, put out by the Ackerman press in London, who, extrav- agantly, gave it full-colour plates. Not trusting to Titsingh’s English, Ackerman had the French re-translated, by Frederic Shoberl, known as a translator from the French and founder and publisher of the admired New Monthly Magazine; he was later author of the definitive histories of Oxford and Cambridge universities.320 Shoberl added a preface, or Address, in which he sought to sell the text not only on the grounds of information of Japan, but also of utility, in that, ‘it seems to me to be a point worthy of consideration, whether British enterprise might not avail itself of this favourable disposition, for attempting, with some chance of success, to establish a connexion with this populous insular empire’.321 The British had already sent a trade mission to Japan, in 1813, though they were too occupied in other parts of the world to pursue it with any vigour, and in 1814, when the United Provinces (renamed, for the fifth time since 1795, the Kingdom of the United Netherlands), became independent again, the British returned Java to its now- genuine king, the former stadtholder William V, crowned as William I; by ceding control of Batavia, the British surrendered (in European law at least) the right to trade with Japan, in 1816.322 Shoberl also included as front matter to his English Illustrations, translations of Malte-Brun’s article on Titsingh’s collection, Nepveu’s ‘Advertisement Respecting the Manuscripts’ (detailing how he obtained the documents, and quoting the anonymous French traveller who met Titsingh in Bengal), and also Titsingh’s letter to Marsden of 10 October 1809, quoted here above, which had also appeared as front matter to the French edition.323 Shoberl added in third place Abel Rémusat’s foreword, ‘Preliminary Remarks to the Private Memoirs of the Shoguns’, which boldly asserts, ‘there is not any work printed in Japan that furnishes particulars of the occurrences in that empire, since the year 1600’,324 lauding Titsingh’s priority, much too emphatically, and worse, omitting to note the existence of Japanese manuscript books. A Dutch edition of Titsingh’s work appeared in 1824–5, published in The Hague, under the title of Bijzonderheden over Japan (Peculiarities of Japan), but this was not Titsingh’s manuscript, which had somehow been lost (though it has since been found); it was a translation of Shoberl’s English.325 The final exposure of Titsingh’s work came a decade later, in 1834, when, as noted above, the chronicle of the dairis was published independently. It was also edited by Klaproth, who found it necessary to warn the reader that the work was, 72 Introduction ‘hardly very exact or complete’, and who, rather nastily, provided sample parallel texts, giving ‘M. Titsingh’s Version’ and ‘The Original’, side by side, so that dis- crepancies could be seen.326 Since Hayashi Gaho¯’s original Table had terminated at the beginning of the Edo Period, Klaproth brought it up to the present, using unstated sources, discussing the later dairis, up to the incumbent, Ko¯kaku. Following the bankruptcy of Nepveu, the Titsingh Cabinet was sold again, in 1827, and this time split up. Most lots went to three buyers, known only by sur- name, as Neveu, Leblanc and Mayer.327 The sale catalogue does not always make clear which lots came from Titsingh and which from the other sellers, though as Titsingh alone had been to Japan, the Japanese items were, it can be assumed, his; but often place of fabrication was unstated, leaving it indeterminate whether a piece was Japanese (and hence Titsingh’s) or not. Of a total of 186 lots, many were lacquer and ceramic, but the largest group is 107 ‘prints of costumes, from peasant to emperor’, though quite possibly these were Chinese. More securely, there are 14 ‘prints of Japanese ladies’ and maps of Japan, Miyako, Osaka and Edo. Prices realised are not recorded. Relevantly, no interest was shown by the Parisian art world, for it was to be another generation before japonisme emerged.328 Abel Rémusat was almost alone in praising the objects qua art, admiring how the paintings and prints showed the Japanese to be, ‘capable of executing better things than those daubs with which we are incessantly reproaching them’, and he added that several of these pictures were worth ‘all the descriptions of Kämpfer and Thunberg’.329 In 1828, Klaproth published his own translation of Hakuseki’s currency book, Ho¯ka shiryaku. Perhaps he had obtained Titsingh’s copy, or perhaps he was cashing in; he does not even mention Titsingh, nor that prior effort. Klaproth romanised the title rather better as Fookoua Siriak, but repeating the erroneous dating of 1708. He correctly identified Hakuseki as the preceptor to Tsunayoshi, though he called him the dairi, not the shogun.330 Many of Titsingh’s books went into the collections of Abel Rémusat and Klaproth; they both sold up in 1833 and 1830 respectively. The titles were further scattered, though many went to Baron Pierre Léopold van Alstein, whose estate in Ghent was then sold in 1863; the plum items were bought by the Earl of Crawford, first collector of Japanese books in England (he already owned at least one book brought by Thunberg from Japan), and Crawford’s descendants, in turn, at the beginning of the twentieth century, gave these to what is now Manchester University Library.331

Afterlife Had Titsingh lived longer, he might have brought his work to a fuller conclusion. But he might not. Jitsuroku sources were often lax and their authors had no access to reference books that could have corrected names and dates. Scholarship has also moved on and clarified certain points. Titsingh might, one would have thought, at least have noticed the confusions of names, titles and dates, and the internal inconsistencies, which are legion, in his work. But then, several translators’ and Introduction 73 editors’ hands can have introduced, as well as corrected mistakes. Philip Franz von Siebold, the great Dutch physician who visited in Japan in 1823–8 and 1859–61 and who was himself author of an admired book on Japan, complained that Titsingh had been ‘mangled and deformed by his editors’.332 As it stands, the level of finish attained was very modest, whoever is to be held accountable. Abel Rémusalt, Klaproth, Shoberl and now your humble servant have all corrected some errors, and it could have been argued that we should have corrected more (or, regrettably, introduced fewer new ones). But at least in the present edition, I have believed it was right, as far as possibly, to introduce Titsingh’s book as Titsingh’s book, as originally known. Serious errors are identified as such, either in the notes, or with ‘sic’ and a note. Mary Busk, in her Manners and Customs of the Japanese, of 1841, dismissed the English Illustrations as ‘unreadable’, though conceding ‘a few anecdotes may be gathered’ from it; she praised the ‘indefatigable’ Kaempfer and Thunberg, and she pirated much of Siebold but had little time for Titsingh.333 On the other hand, when J. W. Spalding accompanied Matthew Perry to ‘open’ Japan to the West, in 1853, he took with him a copy of Titsingh (as well as of Kaempfer and Thunberg), feeling, ‘these are books whose size might deter the stoutest’, but which would ‘well repay the industrious search of the inquirer’.334 After Perry had done his worst, one of the first new-style histories of Japan was Richard Hildreth’s Japan as It Was and Is, published in 1855, and it undermined the memory of the Illustrations further: the author stated as fact that Titsingh knew no written Japanese at all, but only took down what the Nagasaki translators had told him, viva voce.335 From about this time, in all languages, Titsingh vanished. Early in the twentieth century, James Murdock, the fount of information on Japan’s history for a whole generation, was so sure that no one read Titsingh any more that he blithely borrowed large sections of it for his own monumental, though opinionated, History of Japan.336 The French and Dutch versions have never been returned to print. The English version, unavailable for 175 years, was reissued in 2000, but without an introduc- tion or annotations, and purchasable only as part of a very costly fourteen-volume set.337 A Japanese translation was produced in 1970, by Numata Jiro¯, and it has been helpful to the present edition in identifying many Japanese proper names. But Numata did not attempt to elucidate the text any further, and failed to go back to Titsingh’s sources, thereby introducing many errors in Japanese names and terms. The present editor therefore hopes that by reintroducing Titsingh to the modern English-language reader, with full critical apparatus, he will make those eighteenth-century observations available again, and reopen debate on Titsingh’s role. The desire is not to be hagiographic, but rather to reveal the stresses and confu- sions, as well as the excitements, in a crucial moment in the history of international encounter.

Editorial conventions This book presents selections of Isaac Titsingh’s Illustrations of Japan, translated by Frederick Shoberl, and published in London in 1822; Part I gives the ‘Secret 74 Introduction Memoirs’ (also called ‘Private Memoirs’) of the Shoguns, and Part II some of Titsingh’s essays. Part III then contains two other items from Titsingh’s oeuvre, the ‘Philosophical Discourse’, of 1779, which has never before appeared in English, and the ‘Secret Diary’, which records his life during his prolonged second stint in Japan, and which previously appeared in English in 1996 (and from which the translation offered here is adapted). All sections that require it are given their own brief introductions in the body of the text. Throughout, subheadings have been added for ease of navigation. Those of Titsingh’s figures that relate to parts of his book included in the present edition, have been included. Two that relate to matters discussed in the Introduction are also reproduced there. Others are omitted. Spelling, punctuation, paragraphing and, most importantly, romanisation have been updated. Manifest printing errors have been corrected. A definite article has been inserted before era names (nengo¯), as modern usage requires, and before titles, such as Taiko¯ (for Hideyoshi) and Gongen (for Ieyasu). Occasionally and unaccountably, Titsingh abbreviates people’s names, and to avoid confusion, and to remain consistent, these are expanded to their full form. Sterling currency annotations were introduced by Shoberl for the benefit of the British reader of the time, but these are haphazard and fluctuating, and have been deleted. All dates appear in the form of day/month/year. Titsingh gives most Japanese elite names in the official form, with surname and kami (‘honourary marshall’) suffix. Modern historians prefer surname and given name, to concord with current international usage. Where it is possible, the given name is provided in the notes, however, it has not been possible to confirm the correct reading of all the given names (since characters admit of many pronu- nciations), and variants are possible. Errors of fact and inconsistencies have been identified as such in the Notes, although a full fact-checking of all Titsingh’s historical and other claims has not been possible, nor have his mistranslations and glosses been pointed out, except where it is essential to do so. Those who wish to know the clichés of Tokugawa history that circulated in the Edo Period itself, and also see the first aperçus into early-modern Japanese history available in the West, both of which are valuable enterprises, should read on; those who seek factual knowledge, as understood now, in the twenty-first century, should turn to a more modern work, though in doing so, they will lose the panache of the well-turned anecdote. Bibliography

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