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Updated: June 24, 2025
They were compelled to abandon their good quarters at Hirado, and transfer their factory to Deshima, a tiny island only six hundred feet long, by two hundred and forty feet wide.
The Dutchmen who lived at Déshima for two centuries and a half, and the foreigners who first landed at the treaty ports in 1859, on inquiring about the methods of the Japanese Government, the laws and their administration, found that everything was veiled behind a vague embodiment of something which was called "the Law."
This was not done for Japan's sake. The apparent explanation is that the trade at Deshima having ceased to be worth pursuing, the Dutch East India Company had surrendered its monopoly to the Netherlands Government, so that the latter's advice to Japan is explained. But his Majesty's efforts had no immediate result, though they doubtless augmented Japan's feeling of anxiety.
Customs duties amounting to five per cent, were levied; 495 pounds of silver had to be paid annually as a rent for the little island of Deshima, and every year a mission had to proceed to Yedo from the factory, carrying presents for the chief Bakufu officials, which presents are said to have aggregated some 550 pounds of silver on each occasion.
England, indeed, was now much in evidence in the seas of southern China, and the Dutch at Deshima, obeying the instincts of commercial rivalry, warned Japan that she must be prepared for a visit from an English squadron at any moment. The King of Holland now intervened. He sent to Yedo a number of books together with a map of the world and a despatch urging Japan to open her ports.
So, in 1640, the Hollanders were ordered to evacuate Hirado, and occupy the little "outer island" called Déshima, in front of the city of Nagasaki, and connected therewith by a bridge. Any ships entering this hill-girdled harbor, it was believed, could be easily managed by the military resources possessed by the government.
Soon they reached Déshima, the little island which, in Japan's modern history, might well be called its leaven; for here, for over two centuries, the Dutch dispensed those ideas, as well as their books and merchandise, which helped to make the Japan of our day.
The Déshima Dutchman was a kindly adviser, helper, guide and friend, the one means of communication with the world, a handful of salt in the stagnant mass. Long before the United States, or Commodore Perry, the Hollanders advised the Yodo government in favor of international intercourse.
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