Dutch influence in Japan
Nothing to Sneeze at
From 1639 until 1858, the Netherlands was the only European nation trading directly with Japan. Confined to a tiny island in the Bay of Nagasaki, Europeans had limited contact with the general population and only a handful of Japanese could read any western languages. My research examines a different kind of influence - uniquely western objects imported by the Dutch such as clocks, glass and armaments. Through their very presence they taught Japan about the West.
By MARTHA CHAIKLIN
For centuries one of the most stereotypical images of the Dutch was a man with a long white clay pipe. Like any stereotype, this one was based on fact. Amsterdam was the center of the tobacco trade in Europe for two centuries and the Dutch were active in both the cultivation and the processing of the plant. And although the technology for making clay pipes was not originally Dutch, it had been brought from England in the early part of the seventeenth century, they soon became ubiquitous. An account book from a student at Leiden University written in the mid-nineteenth century shows frequent purchases of clay pipes in lots of ninety. Therefore, it must have been through observation that the Japanese formed the same image as the stereotype. Not only did the Dutch bring clay pipes for their own use, but the pipes were frequently requested and given as gifts to the Japanese. So almost all early modern Japanese pictures of Dutchmen portrayed them with a pipe. When a peasant, Murai Kiuemon, helped raise a sunken Dutch ship in 1799, the shogun rewarded him with a crest that contained a Dutch hat and two pipes.The Japanese were as addicted to tobacco as the Dutch were. Sailors must have brought the first samples in the sixteenth century and cultivation began in Nagasaki in 1605. It became a common courtesy to offer a tobacco tray (tobacco, burning coal and an ashtray) to a visitor together with tea. The Japanese favoured a long thin pipe known as a kiseru, which resembled the Dutch pipes more than the kinds of pipes found in other Asian states. The early ones were made completely of metal and were sometimes used by ruffians as weapons in street brawls. Kiseru later shortened in length and came to be made out of all kinds of materials, including ceramic and glass, but the most common design had a metal mouthpiece and bowl on a wooden stem. This last sort was sometimes used as a handy tool to rap unruly children.
For all their association with the pipe, the Dutch were responsible for bringing another form of tobacco to Japan snuff. Tobacco has been inhaled for as long as it has been smoked, but non-medicinal consumption of snuff did not become popular in Europe until the end of the seventeenth century. Although the eighteenth century saw the peak of snuff's popularity, it remained in use well into the twentieth century, particularly by miners and others who could not smoke on the job. Tobacco would be combined with a number of other additives for color, flavour and fragrance and be reduced to a powder. Recipes were innumerable and might contain orange flowers, jasmine, mint, cinnamon cloves, musk, mustard or any number of other substances. Dutch merchants brought the substance to Japan for their own use and the practice must have spread sometime within the second half of the eighteenth century. Only small quantities were imported, but it is possible that some was produced locally. Snuff requires an airtight container to retain its moisture and fragrance, which would have been difficult to maintain on a long sea voyage. One factory head in the 1780's even had to throw away the snuff his father had sent because it had become urine-soaked in transit. The earlier Japanese solution was to use glass bottles like the Chinese did but, by the nineteenth century, snuffboxes were specially ordered from the Dutch. Given its great appeal with the making of combs and other ornaments, tortoise shell was, not surprisingly, a popular material of choice. Other orders requested painted and japanned boxes, but most popular of all were those with musical movements.
Separated by a continent and two oceans, Japan and the Netherlands were still joined at the nose. *
Martha Chaiklin is a PhD candidate at the Institute for the History of the European Expansion (IGEER), in association with the Research School CNWS, Leiden.
E-mail: chaiklin@let.leidenuniv.nl