He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his most recent book, The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan: Gift Giving and Diplomacy, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan at the Bloomsbury Academic website.On May 10, 1657, the Dutch invited a number of Japanese guests to the island of Deshima to partake of a feast. The chief merchant records that he served his distinguished guests “a well-prepared, young, fat billy-goat,” but that the Japanese didn’t seem to like it, preferring instead “bean soup and lean greens.” Here the matter may have rested but, as we have seen in other chapters, although the Japanese always responded to being entertained with a small token of appreciation soon after, on this occasion, only one of the ten guests sent a word of thanks to Deshima, and that was the young son of one of the interpreters. The chief merchant likened the other nine guests to the nine lepers whom Jesus healed in the Gospels but who couldn’t be bothered to come back and thank Jesus for his efforts on their behalf (although likening the chief merchant to Jesus doesn’t seem really in keeping with Dutch Reformed piety!). Be that as it may, the chief merchant goes on to write that this is against all good manners and custom, and speculates that perhaps it’s because the Japanese didn’t like the goat: “If this is true, I think these fussy men should be treated to a young roasted donkey.” He goes on to note, probably with some pent-up bitterness, that it would rather be to the company’s advantage if the Japanese guests wouldn’t come around so much to be entertained as it would surely save the company a pretty penny.For this book, the Page 99 Test works in part, but only in part. The reader is given a snapshot of how material culture was used on the Dutch trading post in Japan to break down barriers between Dutch merchants and Japanese officials. Food and drink were used as formal gift items, for example gifts of wine for the shogun and his officials, but they were also used as informal mechanisms with which to curry favor with local officialdom. In that sense, page 99 illustrates the general premise of the book, which is that gift giving was both a formal and informal mechanism to smooth relations between the Dutch and the shogunal court, especially when relations between the Japanese and foreigners were quite strained in the seventeenth century. The fact that gift-giving was such a prominent part of both personal and professional life on the tiny island of Deshima century after century is a testament to its importance.
The aforementioned feast was not a rare occasion on Deshima. We read of several occasions when the Dutch entertained their Japanese hosts with a formal meal, and even more occasions when Japanese officials called at the island and were invariably entertained with food and drink. In short, much like today, food and drink served a number of functions depending on the occasion: sharing a meal could serve as a social lubricant between people who were of very different social and economic classes, not to mention from totally separate cultural worlds; food and drink could serve as an expression of gratitude for service rendered, or in other words, a thank-you gift given either by the Japanese or by the Dutch; a shared meal could serve as a venue in which to discuss matters both personal and professional; and finally, food and drink were often used by both the Japanese and the Dutch as formal gift items, both between individuals and between the company and the shogunal officials in Nagasaki and Edo.
Another way that page 99 serves to illustrate the premise of the book is to highlight the exasperation the Dutch felt at having to continually ply their Japanese hosts with gifts, both large and small. These gifts were often accompanied by intrusions into Dutch personal space as officials and their entourages came to gawk at the foreignness of the Dutch and to receive the requisite hospitality. It was one thing to write formal gift giving off the cost of doing business in Japan, which the Dutch East India Company did year after year, but quite another altogether to entertain Japanese guests of varying degrees of importance on an almost daily basis.
What page 99 leaves out is the larger context within which Dutch gift-giving should be viewed. The Japanese had expelled all European merchants in about 1640, save for a handful of Dutch merchants on a tiny, man-made island in the far southwest of the country. Dutch gift-giving served initially as a way to demonstrate that the Dutch were essentially paying tribute to the Tokugawa family which consolidated control over all of Japan only a few decades earlier. In this context, Dutch gifts served to bolster the authority of the Tokugawa vis-à-vis other prominent warrior families after a long period of political instability, and also served to illustrate, through ostentatious and highly orchestrated Dutch visits to the shogun’s capital, that the Tokugawa were the rightful rulers of Japan.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
