Japanese History Archives

Conspiracies, Fear, and the Dutch Empire in Asia

On February 23, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern day Indonesia. When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was waterboarded, a cloth “put before his face and fastened behind his head, hanging upon under his chinne, [and] after this the water was poured upon his head.” The result of this “torture of water,” or waterboarding as we would call it today, was a confession, that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants to seize control of the fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp.

The Arms of the Dutch East India Company and of the Town of Batavia, Jeronimus Becx (II), 1651 (SK-A-4643, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and ultimately to torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom admitted to signing onto the plot in return for a substantial reward. A few days later, attention turned to the English, who also confessed, also under torture, to a role in a conspiracy aimed at the “taking of the castle, and the murdering of the Netherlanders.” On March 9, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees with the governor at their head convened to render judgment on the conspirators. The result was an emphatic guilty verdict and shortly thereafter ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.

When news of what had happened on Amboina reached London at the end of May 1624, it sparked immediate outrage from the directors of the English East India Company, from the monarch, James I, and by all accounts from the general public. Passions were further inflamed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets on both sides that sought either to damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn the English as faithless traitors. All of these were accompanied by ubiquitous images of torture and execution at the hands of Dutch officials.

The result was that, despite occurring thousands of miles away in an unfamiliar part of the world, the trial on Amboina swiftly escalated to become one of the most famous legal cases of the age and the subject of a long-running dispute between the Dutch and English governments, which clashed bitterly over the twin issues of blame and compensation. It took close to a decade for the initial uproar to die down but the case remained prominent throughout the seventeenth century, generating a continuous flow of publications including pamphlets, sermons, broadsheet ballads and even a stage play penned by John Dryden in 1673. So famous was the case that its remnants are scattered in archives across the world including the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, which preserves a remarkable set of pamphlets related to Amboina.

Things did not end in the seventeenth century. The controversy was periodically resuscitated in subsequent centuries, reappearing, for example, in the Boer War (1899-1902) when it used by English writers to illustrate the essential villainy of not only the Dutch but also, more tenuously, their Afrikaner descendants in South Africa. It resurfaced even more recently in Giles Milton’s hugely popular history of these events, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (1999), which repeated some of the standard charges made against the VOC.

For hundreds of years now, scholars and popular writers have fought over just what happened on Amboina in 1623. Across this long period, the debate has split along remarkably static national lines. For their part, English writers insist that no plot existed and hence that VOC actions on Amboina was nothing more than the judicial murder of innocents. In contrast, Dutch historians are clear that some sort of conspiracy existed, even if it was still inchoate, and hence that the legal proceedings were essentially justified.

My book was born from a sense of frustration with standard approaches to the case. It aims to move beyond the conventional debate over English guilt or innocence by looking instead at the territory where the trial took place and what was happening there in the weeks and months before Shichizō first appeared on the walls of the fort.

The book starts by shifting the spotlight away from the standard focus on the accused English conspirators to the three Asian parties, local polities on Amboina, Japanese mercenaries, and slaves primarily from South Asia, supposedly implicated in the plot. While the involvement of such different groups raises questions about the likelihood of such an expansive conspiracy, it also reveals something about how the Dutch East India Company was changing in this period. As it dove deeper and deeper into the region’s politics, the organization turned increasingly to Asian settlers to populate its colonies, Asian slaves to provide labor, and Asian fighters to wage war alongside its troops.

Image of Japanese soldiers around 1600. — Column of Japanese Soldiers, Anonymous, 1600 (RP-P-OB-75.407, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Exploring each of these groups in turn, Amboina, 1623 argues that while this process of what one scholar calls “Asiafication” allowed the Company to set down roots in the region, it also created a deep well of colonial anxiety. By working through each element of the supposed plot, the book sets out to trace how the questions of a single young Japanese soldier morphed into a sprawling conspiracy and how the case was driven forward by a potent combination of genuine crisis, imagined threat, and overpowering fear that propelled a rapid escalation from suspicion to torture and finally to mass execution.

In 2006, then prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende called in an impromptu address to the Dutch House of Representatives for a revival of what he described as the “VOC mentality” (VOC- mentaliteit). What he meant, as far as we can make out, was a revived dynamism, optimism, and above all confidence that permitted the Dutch to dominate global commerce in the seventeenth century and which would enable the modern-day Netherlands to recover, in his view, some of its luster by harnessing this spirit. And we are all familiar with the images of Dutch confidence and success from the seventeenth century that are scattered across museums in the Netherlands and beyond.

VOC senior merchant. Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1640– 1660 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. SK- A- 2350)

Such depictions show a familiar image of the confident, conquering European standing in a transformed landscape surrounded by the technologies of power and looming over colonial subjects. In fact, and despite such representations, VOC officials and merchants lived in a world filled with terrors. As they moved into the region, Dutch agents were plunged into an alien landscape that was crowded with sophisticated societies, long-established political and economic networks, and powerful states capable of mustering vast military resources. Clinging to the coast, they felt acutely and constantly vulnerable. Recognizing the pervasive role of fear helps explain the frequently chaotic nature of the Amboina trial. It also tells us something about the Dutch empire in a period still commonly referred to as the Golden Age. Looking closely at the Amboina trial is a reminder that the “VOC mentality,” if we can use such a term, was dominated as much by fear as by confidence, and that this fear dictated how Company officials interacted with the world around them. It is, in other words, something to be studied and understood, certainly, but not emulated.

Adam Clulow, Amboina, 1623: Fear and Conspiracy on the Edge of Empire (2019)

Online Resources

In the process of writing the book, I developed an interactive website, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial (www.amboyna.org), designed to take students into the heart of the Amboina trial. The site allows you to work through the details of the case guided by commentary from historians and barristers and come to a final verdict as to guilt or innocence.

Connected pages on Not Even Past

Adam Clulow and Tom Chandler, Building a Virtual City for the Classroom: Angkor

Image Credits

Banner credit: Andries Beekman, The Castle at Batavia, c. 1661 (detail, SK-A-19, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Kusumoto Ine: A Remarkable Woman in Meiji Restoration Japan

by Mark Ravina

On September 23, 1873, Japan’s young emperor Meiji received tragic news. His consort, Hamuro Mitsuko, had died, five days after delivering a stillborn boy. Sadly, such deaths were not uncommon. The imperial house suffered from high rates of maternal and infant mortality, probably due to some combination of inbreeding and poor diet. Ironically, their elite diet of white rice, unlike the humble Japanese diet of brown rice and millet, led to vitamin B deficiencies and related health problems. One detail of Mitsuko’s labor and delivery warrants special attention, even almost 150 years later. Mitsuko was attended by Kusumoto Ine (1827-1903), Japan’s first female physician.

Kusumoto was an unlikely candidate to serve the imperial house. She was the daughter of a Nagasaki courtesan named Taki, rather than an elite family. Her father was not Japanese, but rather a German physician, Franz von Siebold, who had worked for the Dutch East India Company. Siebold was banished from Japan when Ine was only two. He had exchanged maps with Japanese scholars and physicians, and the shogunate concluded that he was a foreign spy.

*Nagasaki Harbour, Kawahara Keiga (workshop of), c. 1833 – c. 1836, RIjkmuseum, NG-1190*

By almost every measure, she was an outsider: the mixed-race, illegitimate daughter of a courtesan and a foreigner. Ine’s rise from humble origins to the highest circles of Japanese society was part of the revolutionary potential of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s. For bold and ambitious people like Ine, the window between the collapse of the old order, the Tokugawa shogunate, and the consolidation of the new Meiji state, was a period of possibility. For a relatively brief historical moment, Ine’s intelligence and skill mattered more than her birth status or gender. Ine was “born at the right time.”

*Kusumoto Ine, photographer unknown (via Wikipedia and original post)*

In an earlier generation, Ine’s career would have been thwarted by conventional Japanese restrictions on women in the public sphere, as well as the traditional status system. While many Japanese women acquired basic literacy, and some became accomplished poets, women rarely learned classical Chinese, which was central to higher learning. Nor would Ine have been able to transcend her low status. Access to the emperor was so restricted that when the Emperor Nakamikado wished to view an elephant in 1729, the animal first had to be given imperial court rank. And in the early 1800s, the imperial court would not have been interested in a doctor trained in Western medicine.

In a later generation, Ine would have faced different challenges. Beginning in 1868, the new Meiji government instituted “westernizing” and “modernizing” reforms, including new western-style universities. That interest in western knowledge helped advance Ine’s career, since she had learned western-style medicine from her father’s circle of students. But the Meiji government’s westernizing reforms included western-style restrictions on women. Following western models, Japan began to regulate medicine, requiring licensing exams and formal training at recognized schools. But those schools, also following western models, were almost exclusively male. Ine rose to prominence before those restrictions, and she was allowed to continue practicing medicine under a “grandfather clause,” but only as an “old-style midwife” rather than a physician. Thus, the new Meiji government did not liberate women so much as change how it would deny them positions in public life. Viewed from the perspective of Ine’s life, the samurai who “modernized” Japan merely introduced Victorian patriarchal norms to replace Neo-Confucian restrictions.

*Ships in Nagasaki harbor, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1956-461*

Much of Ine’s life seems remarkably “modern.” She was an accomplished professional woman who moved in the highest circles of Japanese society. In the 1860s, before serving the imperial house, Ine worked as house physician to the lord of Uwajima. Seeing her treated with respect by the nobility, foreign observers assumed she was of samurai status.

Ine’s family was global and sprawling. She reconnected with her father in the 1860s, after he was allowed to return to Japan, and established a relationship with her half-brothers Alexander and Heinrich, Siebold’s sons by his German wife. Ine chose to raise her daughter, Tada, as a single mother. Tada’s father was Ishii Sōken (1796–1861), one of Siebold’s students and Ine’s teachers. Ine accepted Sōken’s instruction and professional support, but refused to marry him. Her decision likely had a #metoo component: after her mother’s death, Tada reported that Sōken had raped Ine. Ine navigated that fraught relationship with determination, rejecting Sōken’s marriage proposals but accepting his career help.

*Ine’s daughter, Kusumoto Takako (right) and her husband Mise Shūzō (Wikipedia).*

But Ine’s story also shows the “lumpiness” of history — there is rarely a straight path from “then” to “now.” Rather we find moments in the past that seem more “modern” than recent events. Ine’s story leaps out to us as an example of events from 150 years ago that seem immediate and directly connected to our present moment.

For more on the “lumpy” history of modern Japan, see:

Mark Ravina, Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (2017)

Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration (1961). A classic study of a charismatic rebel leader of the 1860s.

Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Task and the Meiji Restoration (1998). A thoughtful feminist intervention: the Meiji Restoration as seen through the life of a politically engaged woman poet.

Mark Ravina. The Last Samurai: the Life and Battle of Saigō Takamori (2004). My biography of the most controversial figure in the early Meiji government

Top image credit: Kawahara Keiga, Arrival of a Dutch Ship, depicting Ine, Taki, and Siebold at Dejima (Wikipedia).

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

By Kazushi Minami

Few topics in history have produced a larger literature than the origins of the Cold War. Since its onset, historians, rightists or leftists, have hotly debated whether the United States or the Soviet Union initiated the mutual antagonism, culminating in the Korean War. After decades of controversy, the scholarly tensions have now died down, though the issue is far from settled, as most Cold War historians moved on to a myriad of other issues. One may, therefore, well ask: Do we need yet another book about the making of the Cold War? Hajimu Masuda says yes. Contrary to the predominant notion of the Cold War as geopolitical and ideological struggle between the capitalist and communist states, Cold War Crucible depicts it as a social construct that local peoples consciously or unconsciously created from the bottom up. For Masuda, the Cold War was a popular fantasy, not an objective reality.

Cover of Red Channels, a pamphlet-style book issued by the journal Counterattack in 1950. Via Wikipedia.

Masuda begins by explaining how Cold War perceptions took shape in the United States, China, and Japan before the Korean War. After WWII, American labor unions, women, and blacks openly called for more rights; Chinese students with vivid memories of WWII opposed U.S. reconstruction of Japan; Japanese workers and students demanded liberal reforms. These social movements, though not caused by communist conspiracies, met a growing backlash from conservatives in each country, who adopted Cold War language, such as “un-American,” “Commies,” and “Reds,” to denounce liberals.

He goes on to analyze how popular discourse distinguishing “us” from “them” during the Korean War consolidated the Cold War realities in the United States and China. Despite deep uncertainty within Harry Truman’s administration about crossing the 38^th parallel on the Korean Peninsula, public enthusiasm and Republican pressure for victory against communists emboldened American policymakers. Likewise, despite ambivalence within the Communist Party toward the Korean War, Chairman Mao Zedong decided to send the People’s Volunteer Army because of popular outcry that connected the war against U.S. imperialists to the domestic struggle against landlords and bourgeoisies. Public support for the war, fueled by widespread fear of WWIII, translated local particularities into a monolithic reality of the Cold War.

Chinese Propaganda poster during the Korean War

Worldwide purges of liberals transformed such fears into political realities. In the United States, conservative offensives against African Americans, homosexuals, labor leaders, and immigrants, as well as gender struggle against working women, gave birth to McCarthyism. Similarly, Britain’s crackdown on labor unions, Japan’s Red Purge, Taiwan’s White Terror, and the Philippine’s suppression of “un-Filipino” activists, though all reflecting social divides at the local level, reinforced the Cold War illusion. Masuda concludes that, “the reality of the Cold War materialized in the crucible of the postwar era… leading to the rise of a particular mode of Cold War fantasy that ‘fit’ well with social needs of populations around the world.”

So, was the Cold War simply a fantasy? Of course not. Masuda does not intend to ignore the actual geopolitical and military conflicts in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Instead, he argues that the Cold War was a product of complex interactions between international and local leaders and the populace. Although the Korean War was no doubt a military reality for U.S. and Chinese policymakers, ordinary peoples interpreted it through local lenses, which turned the foreign war into a factor in domestic social conflicts. Readers, however, may wonder if Masuda slightly overemphasizes the local agency, as he often cites emotional letters by ordinary citizens, while paying relatively little attention to strategic concerns of top-level policymakers.

Reality of Korean War: A G.I. comforts a grieving infantryman. Via Wikipedia

Such a caveat aside, Cold War Crucible is a welcome addition to the rich historiography on the origins of the Cold War, as well as the burgeoning literature on the role of popular perception in international relations. Using primary sources from sixty-four archives in ten countries and regions, Masuda offers a truly international history. Although it is clearly too much to ask for more language sources, his research begs further study on Europe and the Soviet Union to examine whether the same reality-making mechanism was in place in the European front of the Cold War, where geopolitical and ideological confrontation was more intense than in Asia.

Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press. 2015)

History Museums: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

By David Conrad

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, at Naka-ku Hiroshima Japan, design by Kenzo Tange in 1955. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s strange that of the two most famous war-related museums in Japan, the one in Hiroshima, within sight of the untouched-since-1945 “Atomic Bomb Dome” that provides a stark reminder of the city’s destruction, is the more palatable. The other is the Yūshūkan, attached to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, controversial because it puts the onus on the war on every party except Japan and neglects to mention the military’s atrocities in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The Yūshūkan is well worth visiting in spite of its sins of omission, because it houses one of the only Zero fighter planes on public display. But the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a must-visit despite its distance from Tokyo. Its displays are up-front about Japan’s share of responsibility for the war and about the factors that made Hiroshima a target (it was for decades home to a major army base), while condemning with visual horrors the disproportionate, indiscriminate atomic destruction of the city. The museum offers a walk through of Hiroshima’s history with a tight focus on the moments and days after 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945. The walls of the ground floor are paneled with copies of every letter that each Hiroshima mayor has sent to every world leader whose country has tested a nuclear weapon. Most of the recent ones are addressed to President Barack Obama; although the U.S. has not tested a nuclear weapon in the old-fashioned way since 1992, it carries out “subcritical” tests to this day. Another wall display shows the number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors who are still living, and where in the world they are. At the time of my last visit to the museum in December 2013 there were still survivors in every prefecture of Japan, but within a few decades they will be gone and this museum will be even more crucial in preserving their memory.

Letters of protest written by the Mayor of Hiroshima.

Notes from the Field: Northeast Japan after the Tsunami

By David Conrad

I lived near the port city of Kesennuma, in northeastern Japan, from 2006 to 2008. That was several years before the event they call 3/11. That’s March 11, 2011, the day a record-setting earthquake and tsunami devastated the area and cost over 18,000 lives. Most of the victims were Japanese, but several foreigners died as well, including two Americans who were doing same the job I had done: teaching English in elementary and junior high schools.

Kesennuma Fishing Port in 2006.

I kept in touch with several friends in Japan after I returned to the United States to attend graduate school. When the tsunami hit and it became clear just how bad the damage was, there was a long, tense period as I waited to hear from them through email or Facebook or mutual acquaintances. Fortunately, nobody I knew died in the tragedy. But many of them did lose their homes, their cars, and their own family members, friends, students, and neighbors.

Shishiori-Karakuwa Station after the 2011 Tsunami.

I couldn’t help but wonder how the place I used to live had changed. In the months following the disaster I heard about the shops and homes that had been washed away, about the temporary housing that cropped up, and about the giant beached ships (Kesennuma is a major commercial fishing port) that were left sitting inland after the waters receded.

The blue placard near the window of a Karakuwa shrine shop marks the tsunami’s water line. Many businesses in the area feature similar placards.

My dissertation involves Japan, though it is not related to the tsunami, and I received the opportunity to research there for the 2013-2014 academic year. I was thrilled to go back, and even more thrilled that through happenstance and the invaluable help of Japanese historians on both sides of the Pacific I was able to live in the same general part of the country I had lived in years before. This time I was three hours away from Kesennuma, close enough to visit relatively easily.

Nothing I had heard could have prepared me for what I saw there. While many buildings I recognized were still standing, and some had already been rebuilt, large swaths of the town were simply gone. One of Kesennuma’s two rail stations had been destroyed, and I did not have a car, so I traveled there by bus. It dropped off in the middle of several cracked foundations. Only by memory could I tell that I was a stone’s throw from the site of a restaurant I used to frequent. A friend picked me up at the bus stop, and on our way to his home in my old neighborhood we passed a fishing vessel tipped on its side. The ocean was several meters away on the righthand side of the road, and the ship was on the left.

A bus stop in Kesennuma City. These foundations are that’s left of buildings that once stood here. In some parts of this city there are acres of nothing but foundations.

In my old neighborhood we drove past the site of an elementary school I used to teach at. It had been a century-old wooden building, architecturally beautiful but with a permanent stench from bad plumbing. It had probably needed to be replaced, but not like this. In its place was a cluster of small, plasticky temporary houses that stood out among the modern homes and large, old wooden ones that survived the disaster. Many observers have argued, and I agree, that the Japanese government has been too slow to replace the tens of thousands of destroyed residences in the affected parts of the country.

Temporary houses in Karakuwa, the neighborhood of Kesennuma City where I used to live. Most people displaced by the tsunami stayed near their original homes, either with relatives or in temporary housing, but some moved to other cities in the area like Sendai City and Ichinoseki City.

Temporary houses in Karakuwa, a neighborhood in Kesennuma City. Most people displaced by the tsunami stayed near their original homes, either with relatives or in temporary housing, but some moved to other cities in the area like Sendai City and Ichinoseki City.

While there was ample physical evidence of the disaster, the attitudes of the people I met and renewed friendships with were almost universally “genki”—a Japanese word meaning healthy, happy, and lively. One friend who lost her home and her business on 3/11 treated me to her memories of that day, and concluded by insisting “This [loss of property] is not sad. Because there were many people who lost their lives.”

However, the nuclear aspect of the disaster is still a source of concern for many. The troubled and leaking Fukushima reactor is just a few hours south of Kesennuma. I visited one shop in nearby Sendai City that advertised “Fukushima-free” foods, made without any agricultural or sea-based products from the area around the plant. Every scientific study I know of has determined that food from most of Fukushima is safe to eat, but farmers there are having a hard time convincing the public to buy their goods. Almost every day’s television news broadcast leads with an update on the damaged plant. On the other hand, at one sushi party I attended another foreigner asked whether any of the fish was from waters off Fukushima. A Japanese patron responded, “Maybe, but we can’t worry about it.” Not to eat fish is too great a sacrifice.

A bowl of raw seafood. Some of this may have come from water near the damaged Fukushima reactor, but when it’s right in front you, you just “can’t worry about it.”

While in Japan I hosted several visitors from America (and two from Australia), and they all reported having a wonderful time. Disaster-affected areas are working to increase tourism to help their ongoing recovery. It is safe to visit the northeast of Japan, and the area is home to several unique, ancient sites that are off the usual tourist path but every bit as rewarding as locations in Tokyo and Kyoto. If you get a chance to go, let me know, and I’ll give you a list. I miss Japan greatly and look forward to going back again someday.

Few foreign tourists visit this breathtaking gorge in northeast Japan, even at peak fall leaf viewing seasons. It is not far from Sendai City.

David Conrad at Takkoku no Iwa, a shrine built into a rock face near Ichinoseki City.

First two images via Wikimedia Commons.

All remaining photos courtesy of David Conrad.