KARITSU-GAISHI

Bankoku-Tokai Nendai-Ki... [A Chronicle of Foreign Relations].

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N.p. (Japan), 1854. Small octavo, with two fine coloured woodblock prints, one double-page; original stitched wrappers, original cloth folding case; now preserved in a handsome green quarter morocco bookform box, banded spine gilt with red morocco labels. Rare and charming Japanese publication, with two fine coloured woodcuts, one a double-page view of a Dutch ship entering Nagasaki Bay, and the other depicting a Russian naval officer in full dress uniform.

This slight volume was published as a description of the various voyages of foreign nations that arrived in Japan, from the earliest times up to the arrival of Perry at Uraga and Shimoda in 1854. One of the prints was used in the publication two years earlier of Manjiro Nakahama's famous Record of Drifting (see our catalogue of the Carlsmith collection, number 278).

Dutch traders operated in Nagasaki in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries: they were confined to the island of Deshima (Dejima), in the harbour. Only about two hundred by eighty metres, it had originally been set aside for the Portuguese as a compromise allowing them to be in Japan but preventing their propagation of Christianity. The Dutch merchants of the VOC were exotic figures, as their confinement to Deshima meant that they would barely have been seen by most residents of Nagasaki, let alone other Japanese of the period. The depiction of exotic foreigners in the Japanese decorative arts was a feature that began in the early eighteenth century: in recent years we have offered an important Imari bowl depicting VOC ships and personnel, and a rare printed view of the island.
Edo, 1854 (illustrated, p. 58).

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