Kobe University Repository : Kernel · Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland 45 of Japan’s traditional images” (Nihei 98), while Murakami represents Western pop culture elements through

Kobe University Repository : Kernel

タイトルTit le

Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland : The Imag(i)nat ion of Gaijin in DavidMitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet(想像の祖国としての出島 : デイヴィッド・ミッチェル『ヤコブ・デズートの千の秋』におけるガイジン／外人の（イマジ）ネーション)

著者Author(s) Wang, Ching-Chih

掲載誌・巻号・ページCitat ion 海港都市研究,8:41-59

刊行日Issue date 2013-03

資源タイプResource Type Departmental Bullet in Paper / 紀要論文

版区分Resource Version publisher

権利Rights

DOI

JaLCDOI 10.24546/81004813

URL http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/handle_kernel/81004813

Create Date: 2018-08-08

41

Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland

The Imag(i)nation of Gaijin in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Ching-Chih WANG

The portraits of strangers have been widely and strategically re-examined by scholars of

contemporary British fictions who focus on the anxieties of alienation that the outsiders would

encounter in the era of uncertainty. By suggesting David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of

Jacob de Zoet (2010) as a text that deals with imaginations of the uncertain, I argue that the

images and imaginations of gaijin (the alien) described by Mitchell in his creation of the Dutch

colonizers of Dejima, a protruding and secluded artificial island offshore the Nagasaki harbor,1

are reflections of his writing as a gaijin in Japan. They also lay bare the outsiders’ ignoration of

the strangeness implied in their construction of the imaginary homeland. Alienated as a gaijin on

Dejima, Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch officer working for the Dutch East Indies Company (De

Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the VOC), perceives the world not through his eyes but

through his imaginations. It first appears that he enters into a bewilderment of cultural dislocation

and miscommunication. Such mis-conceptualization and alienation, however, unbolt the padlock

of the uncommunicative and paradoxically resolve the mysteries of his-story (his story and history)

as a gaijin on an isolated island designed to keep the Westerners at bay. How can the outcast

Dutch colonizer imagine the alien nation, Dejima, as his homeland, and eventually redeem his

sense of alienation? In addition to the analysis of gaijin’s image and his imagined nation, the

“imag(i)nation” I coin in this paper, I would also explore the influence of the Dutch Learning

on the secluded Japan during the turn of the eighteenth century. Exercised in the name of the

shougun ( 将軍 ), Japan locks herself up and the Dutch study becomes the only means she learns

about the world. How can the foreign Rangaku ( 蘭学 , the Dutch Learning) assist the midwife,

Orito, to transform from “the disfigured damsel, spurned by her own race” (Mitchell, TAJZ 62) to

a bridge that brings the pre-modern Japan “from ignoration, . . . to knowledge”? (Mitchell, TAJZ

　1　Dejima was constructed in the shape of a fan because, as legend had it, when the shogun was asked to decide its formation, he had “snapped open his fan with a turn of his wrist” (Goodman 19). The name Dejima means “Fore Island,” which aptly describes its position before the town of Nagasaki.

海港都市研究42

69, emphasis original)?2 Why is her projecting Dejima as an imaginary homeland apposite to her

“goal in life” (Mitchell, TAJZ 69)? Other than the stranger’s imaginary homeland, the differentiated

colonial control executed on Dejima will also be tackled in the examination of gaijin’s failure to

understand the reality. Distinct from the other imperialists who are usually soldiers or missionaries

when participating in colonial expansions, the Dutch colonizers in Japan are traders, scholars, or

physicians. To what extent do they make a contrast to those who claim unauthorized sovereignty

over the colony? How do the Dutch colonizers devise policies to control over the so-called

uncivilized people? In like manner, the Japanese middlemen described in the novel do not directly

engage in colonial exploitations, but they cunningly choose to keep their heads down when facing

the huge profits the Dutch colonizers bring along through usurpations of their colonies. Another

go-between character in Mitchell’s Dejima story is the Dutch language translator, Sôzaemon

Ogawa. Why is Dejima a place where his imagination of the gaijin becomes substantialized?

In what sense does his study of the Dutch provide great “solace”? (Mitchell, TAJZ 86) How

does Rangaku assist in unlocking the chained society? From which aspect can David Mitchell’s

intervention in and invention of history configurate a paradigm for the study of contemporary

British fictions ?

Writing as a gaijin

David Mitchell was once an alien sojourned in Hiroshima in his mid twenties, but his early life

in the town of Malvern in Worcestershire, England, would never have anything to do with alienation

because it was “white, straight, and middle-class,” as he told Adam Begley in 2012 (Begley). After

exposing himself in a foreign land for nine years, Mitchell published his first novel, Ghostwritten

(1999). It was highly praised by its fabrication of an “intricately assembled Fabergé egg,” where “a

daisy chain of characters” wander through every time zone to go across “the gamut of individual

experience” (Mendelsohn). This ambitious and weighty debut book won him the John Llewellyn

Rhys Prize for the best work of literature by a British or Commonwealth author thirty-five or

younger. He was also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for his second novel, Number9Dream

(2001), and his third, Cloud Atlas (2004). In 2003, Granta acclaimed him one of the best young

　2　The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet will hereafter be abbreviated as TAJZ when referred in parentheses.

Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland 43

British novelists, while Time magazine, following the publication of his fourth novel, Black Swan

Green (2006), honored him as the only literary novelist in their 2007 list of the one hundred most

influential people in the world.

Unlike the British Asian author Kazuo Ishiguro, who writes novels to “recreate” a Japan that

can “put together” all his memories of Japan before they fade away (Ishiguro and Oe 110), David

Mitchell commits to writing stories about Japan to tackle the sense of alienation he experienced in

Japan. In an author essay he writes for the publisher, Random House, Mitchell reveals such anxiety

and says: “In Japan, I am . . . an alien amongst natives” because Japan is a “classic club society” in

which he has to “kiss [his] sense of social belonging goodbye” (“Japan and My Writing”). Different

from the “Mission” countries that define “foreignness” by behavior, the “Club” countries define

foreignness by one’s “lineage or passport.” It makes no significant difference for “what you do, how

well you learn the language, . . . you are foreign and always will be.” On the contrary, in Mission

countries, as a foreigner acts “like a native, and as far as other natives are concerned,” he eventually

has “as much right to be there as [the natives] do” (“Japan and My Writing”). It is this lack of

belonging that urges him to start his writing career:

I lack a sense of citizenship in the real world, and in some ways, commitment to it. To

compensate, I stake out a life in the country called writing. I don’t mean the publishing world:

I mean a mental state . . . , where characters and plots in the head achieve the solidity of people

and lives outside the head. Of course, other writers not living in Japan, and many non-writers,

not to mention psychotics, do the same. But for me, my ability to compound inner-skull reality

is a direct result of my life away from where I “belong.” To date, many of my characters show

the same trait. (“Japan and My Writing”)

Writing not only grants him compensation for sense of alienation, it also awards him with

“fulfillment.” As he tells Sam Bradford,

What will always be true is that you write because it’s fulfilling, and right now part of the

fulfillment is the multiplicity of voices. The buzz and satisfaction of expressing something, not

only hopefully reasonably well, but in one character’s voice reasonably well. That’s very very

fulfilling. (Bradford)


For the gaijin writer David Mitchell, his intention to create “plurality of lenses” for “a necessary

forcing of the limits of the imagination” (Finbow) cannot be understood if he puts himself and his

works outside the context of Japan because Japan is a “built-up” place bombarded with signs and

codes that are “largely” strange to him (Mitchell, “Japan and My Writing”). He would “understand

less” if he tries to understand more. It is for such perplexity Mitchell thinks that for “foreigners,

the casing of the human condition sometimes turns transparent, like a see-through Swatch” (“Japan

and My Writing”). The transparent cover of a Swatch seemingly displays every part of the watch,

but for the uninitiated strangers, the casing of the transparent watch illuminates nothing but their

ignoration of how the machine proceeds to function in reality. To put Mitchell’s words succinctly,

a “see-through Swatch” covers a stranger’s inability to understand; it also uncovers the foreignness

implied in his imagination of the real world.

David Mitchell in several occasions has mentioned about how Japanese arts have influenced

his writing strategies. His conceptualization of “less is more,” for example, is developed by the

allusive Haiku, while the ending of Ghostwritten is “influenced directly by the ending of Mishima’s

problematic masterpiece, The Sea of Fertility (“Japan and My Writing”). Likewise, Haruki

Murakami’s novels fascinate him, especially The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, because they show

him “how literature can marry popular culture to cook up humour and metaphor” while indicating

tactics for a stranger to manage sense of alienation as he is “overly impressionable” to the world

around him (Mitchell, “Japan and My Writing”). But his Number9Dream is not simply “an homage

or an imitation of Murakami,” Mitchell tells Begley (Begley). He also says elsewhere that his

admiration for Murakami comes not from his world-renown reputation but his “depicting Japan as

it is” (Hogan). Mitchell admits that he always has an issue with the way Japan is portrayed in the

West: “the land of cherry blossoms, geisha, Mt. Fuji, and Kamikaze pilots.” Murakami’s depiction

can help find “the beauty in the ugliness” (Hogan). Chikako Nihei supports Mitchell’s justification

and maintains that both Mitchell and Murakami have strived through their works to subvert the

stereotypes about Japan. Mitchell uses his experience in Japan and devises “a Japanese subjective

voice” in his stories about Japan because he wants to “go beyond conventional Western descriptions

of Japan” (Nihei 92). However, his adoptions of the “cultural and ethnic Other” paradoxically

“cater to Western readers’ desires for Japaneseness,” in the same way as Murakami does when he

“includes a certain degree of ‘Japanese essence’ for his foreign readers” (Nihei 101-2). To challenge

stereotypes about Japan, Mitchell overturns “the readers’ expectations” through his “exaggeration


of Japan’s traditional images” (Nihei 98), while Murakami represents Western pop culture elements

through his frequent use of katakana, the Japanese syllabary for foreign words (Nihei 94-95), to

reiterate that those written in katakana are originally “foreign products” (Numano 150). They also

make the readers “aware of the presence of such words as foreign, alien elements” that contribute

to the “general sense of estrangement created by the texts” (Suter 68). Other than Mishima and

Murakami, Mitchell further explains that

Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters exemplif[ies] how compulsive the mundane can

become if you look at it in the right way. Zen art uses space as matter pregnant with possible

meaning, and Toru Takemitsu’s otherworldly compositions demonstrate how loud silence can

be. Japanese film is adept at dialogue-through-gesture—perhaps this tradition has its roots in

Noh theatre. Don’t make a character say it—move the character’s head, in just the right way,

and it is said. I could have and would have learned the same things from non-Japanese sources

. . . but it so happens I learned them through the media of Japanese art, and I think they affect

the way I write. (“Japan and My Writing”)

Culturally dislocated in Japan, David Mitchell transforms from an alienated foreigner in Japan

to a novelist using Japanese protagonists to expand the imagination of nation and narration. His

appropriation of Japan and application of Japanese arts not only subvert the stereotypical reading of

the orient but also inspire a multifarious approach to the study of contemporary British fictions.

The Land of a Thousand Autumns, or an Island of Strangers?

Japanese scholar Tomohiko Nagoshi also agrees upon the fact that Mitchell’s life in Japan

coincides with the start of his education as a writer. He points out in his inquiry into the “foreign”

implied in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet:

ミッチェルは二十代の半ばから八年間に渡って広島に滞在し英語教師を務めた経歴を

持つが、それは彼の創作に大きな影響を及ぼしており、実際彼は日本を舞台にした小

説をこれまでにもいくつか書いている。(Nagoshi 37)


The characters he creates, especially Jacob de Zoet, are reflections of the writer’s personal

experiences of being treated for quite some time as a “ ガイジン ” (gaijin) in Japan (Nagoshi 38).

In his demonstration of the foreign in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Nagoshi focuses on

the leitmotif of strangeness and asserts that Dejima is the island of strangers (“ 異人たちの島 ”)

because it is the “access” from which the isolated Japan started her contact with the Westerners, the

foreign languages and cultures, and most important of all, the Western scientific study, Rangaku

(Nagoshi 37, 38-39). Dejima intriguingly provokes all kinds of “strangeness” through which the

Japanese, the Dutch colonizers, and the colonized Indonesians continually and repeatedly exchange

their looks to one another as the other (Nagoshi 40). Only through the contact with the “foreign” (異 )

can the gaijin accomplish the initiation process of “self-formation” (Nagoshi 44). In addition to his

metaphorical description of Dejima as an island of strangers, Nagoshi also explains the meaning of

“thousand autumns” in the title and suggests that A Thousand Autumns of Jocob de Zoet be read as

“Jacob de Zoet’s Japan,” or “Japan in the eyes of Jacob de Zoet” (Nagoshi 38). Although the poetic

usage of “thousand autumns” is brought up incidentally by an English Lieutenant as “florid names”

the Japanese give to their kingdom to signify “The Land of a Thousand Autumns” or “The Root of

the Sun” in the novel (Mitchell, TAJZ 366), “the thousand autumns” in reality allude to the oldest

extant Japanese chronicle, Kojiki (《古事記》, the “Record of Ancient Matters”), where Japan is

described as “ 豐葦原の千秋長五百秋の水穂國 ” (Nagoshi 52, 38).3 Following Nagoshi’s logic, I

contend that the thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet are traces of a stranger’s life in Japan; they also

reveal his imagination of an alien-nation.

Set in Japan in 1799, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a historical novel dealing with

questions of alienation and strangerhood. The period from 1640 to 1853 was a strict time for the

Westerners in Japan.4 During the era of complete isolation, the Japanese empire only maintained

commercial ties with two great powers of the time, one the East Asian “celestial empire” of

China and the other the powerful European maritime nation of Holland (Goodman 1). Only a

　3　“Toyoashihara-no-Chiaki-Nagaioaki-no-Mitsuho-no-Kuni” metaphorically refers to “An Eternnal Land of Fresh Rice of Fertile Reed Plain,” while “Chiaki” literally means “a thousand autumns.”

　4　In 1640 the sakoku ( 鎖国 , “locked country”) foreign relation policy of Japan was enacted by the Tokugawa Shogunate to restrict foreigner from entering and Japanese leaving the country on death penalty. This foreign policy remained in force until 1853 when the American Commodore Mathew Perry’s Black Ships arrived along with the forcible opening of Japan to Western trade. According to the sakoku policy, the only European influence permitted was the Dutch factory at Dejima as a reward for the Dutch businessmen’s participation on the side of the “anti-Catholic” Japanese (Goodman 1, 14-15).


few Dutch traders were allowed to establish brief and light associations with the isolated feudal

Japanese society, and they could not leave Dejima without the superintendence of otona (大人, the

supervisors).Vice versa, the only Japanese who could set foot on Dejima were Japanese officials

and merchants and translators paid by the VOC, while the only women permitted through the “land

gate” of Dejima were “costly courtesans,” “who [were] hired for a night,” or “‘wives’ who stay[ed]

under the roofs of the better-paid [Dutch] officers for longer periods” (Mitchell, TAJZ 48). Dejima,

“a high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island, some two hundred paces along its outer curve, . . . by

eighty paces deep, and erected, like much of Amsterdam, on sunken piles” (Mitchell, TAJZ 16),

was a kind of floating village connected by a bridge to the mainland. This bridge guarded on both

sides separated the Japanese Empire from the outer world, but it was precisely this channel that the

“Land of a Thousand Autumns” envisioned and imagined the imperial West. Jacob de Zoet came to

Dejima at this historical juncture when, as Mitchell tells Begley,

Japan possessed the keyhole of Dejima to peer through, to keep abreast of international events

and observe the fates of countries and races that tried to ignore the rise of Europe and its new

technologies. Moreover, Dejima inverts the common Orientalist terms—on this tiny man-made

island, it was the whites who were corralled, fleeced, and exoticized. Cees Nooteboom says

that all countries are different, but Japan is differently different. Dejima is a differently different

cultural abnormality. (Begley, emphasis added)

Settling on Dejima for making colonial profits, the Dutch East Indies Company clerks were strictly

monitored by the country they planned to exploit. Such “differently different” colonization became

even more perplexing and ambivalent after the bankruptcy of the VOC and the Netherlands under

French Napoleonic rule:

Amsterdam is on its knees; [Dutch] shipyards are idle; [Dutch] manufactories silent; [Dutch]

granaries plundered; The Hague is a stage of prancing marionettes tweaked by Paris; Prussian

jackals and Austrian wolves laugh at [the Dutch] borders; and Jesus in heaven, since the bird-

shoot at Kamperduin [the Dutch] are left a maritime nation with no navy. (Mitchell, TAJZ 10,

emphasis original)


Dejima by then was the only place in the world where the Dutch flag twitched “very nearly lifeless”

(Mitchell, TAJZ 96). When the Dutch Empire was transported to Nagasaki Harbor in the East, Jacob

de Zoet could not but recall his memory of home on the floating island and live up with the reality

of being a displaced other who had to constantly confront with the “differently different cultural

abnormality” in the floating world.

Differently Different Colonization

The Dutch colonizers described in the novel strategically disavow the ontology of the white

world in order to claim sovereignty over their imaginary homeland and continue their Japanese

trade monopoly. They are treated as “shogun’s hostages” (Mitchell, TAJZ 25) and strictly monitored

by Constable Kosugi, who is in charge of conducting the “twice-daily muster” (Mitchell, TAJZ

130). Even after the devastating earthquake, chief Vorstenbosch complains: “The jackals [of the

Japanese Empire] would line us up like children even as they reef us” (Mitchell, TAJZ 73). To “list

and name” people who are supposed to preside over the business on the island, Jacob thinks, “is

to subjugate them” as the enslaved (Mitchell, TAJZ 130, emphasis original). The magistrate also

rules that “a beaten coolie is an affront to all Japan” and forbids the Dutch to discipline their Malay

slaves, which results in the fact that “[the slaves’] knavery knows no bounds” (Mitchell, TAJZ 19).

Their every-four-year pilgrimage to the capital Edo to pay their respects and homage to the shogun,

the Sankin-kōtai (参勤交代, lit. “alternate attendance,” a daimyo’s alternate-year residence in Edo)5

is another evidence of the Dutchmen’s dislocation of culture and mind. As Dr. Marinus remembers

his meeting with the shogun, he recalls not only his reticent disavowal of cultural difference but

also the memory of “a foul of death”:

Our costume was the deposited pomp of a century and a half: Hemmij was bedecked in a

pearl-buttoned jacket, a Moorish waistcoat, an ostrich-feathered hat, and white tapijns over

his shoes, and with Van Cleef and I in like mishmash, we were a true trio of decayed French

　5　It was a policy of the shogunate in Edo period that all daimyo ( 大名 , the powerful territorial lords subordinate only to the shogun in pre-modern Japan) should make pilgrimages to Edo to pay their respects to the shogun. In the original charter granted to the Dutch by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the Dutch traders were given the privilege of paying homage directly to the shogun (Goodman 25). The trip was made every four years after 1790 (Goodman 243).


pastries. . . . The shogun—half hidden by a screen—sits on the raised rear of the room. When

his interlocutor announces, “Oranda Kapitan,” Hemmij scuttled, crabwise, shogun-ward, knelt

at a designated spot, forbidden even to look at the lofty personage, and waited in silence until

the barbarian-quelling generalissimo lifted a single finger. A chamberlain recited a text . . . ,

forbidding us to proselytize the wicked Christian faith or to accost the junks of the Chinese or

the Ryûkyû Islanders, and commanding us to report any designs against Japan that came to our

ears. Hemmij scuttled backward, and the ritual was complete. (Mitchell, TAJZ 148)

That evening, Hemmij complains of stomach gripes, which unfortunately turns into “a foul death.”

Although Hemmij pleads for Dr. Marinus’s help and says, “Not here, . . . not like this,” a foreign

body cannot but remorsefully be buried in “pagan soil” (Mitchell, TAJZ 148).

The Dutch in the Japanese history accept whatever restrictions the shogunate imposes, but it is

inappropriate to thus infer that “they ever were or are by nature a subservient people” (Goodman

24). Their belief in the necessity for maintaining their Japanese trade monopoly in consideration

of their domestic economy is too strong to be ignored. As Goodman advances in his study of Japan

and the Dutch in 1600-1853:

Great profits had been reaped in the years from 1638 to 1641, and there was every reason

to hope that these would continue despite restrictions. The Dutch understood, however, that

their presence in Japan was not indispensable and that many of the petty Bakufu officials who

swarmed about them were looking for opportunities to report infringements of regulations,

hoping thereby to enhance their own prestige. Consequently, the Hollanders remained calm

in the face of great adversity and carefully obeyed the provisions of the many Japanese

ordinances. (24)

For the Dutch colonizers created by David Mitchell, bearing with the denigrated label, “Kômô”

(the red-haired), and the detention on Dejima is imagining themselves “in a half-cracked jade

bowl,” where the glory of the Dutch Empire is shaded and stained by corruption and self-deception

(Mitchell, TAJZ 20, 16, emphasis original). Even so, the Dutch gaijins still struggle to intensify

the feeble colonial radiance through conspiracy with the colonial agents and their imagination of

the Orient. It is in light of this I maintain that the colonial experience those Dutch businessmen


encounter on Dejima is apparently abnormal in terms of the colonizers’ absolute power over the

place and the people they colonize, but the Dutch colonialization on Dejima in fact manifests

an ambivelent “normal abnormality.” They endure harshness and succumb to the Tokugawa

shogunate’s rule because Japan is not only their “most profitable factory in Asia” but also served

as a “bank” that finances VOC operations throughout Asia after trade with Japan took off in the

1630s (Laver 24-25). They also know that “under despotic government one must display humility

and docility” (Goodman 16). In Jacob de Zoet’s case, “the trees what survive cruel winds are those

what do bend,” Grote, the cook who violates VOC rules on private trades and misappropriation,

tells Jacob when he tries to persuad Jacob to sell mercury powder to Abbot Enomoto and earns

commission from this brokerage business (Mitchell, TAJZ 108, emphasis original). To strengthen

their Japanese trade monopoly and their domestic economy, expedient subsurvience and

concessions are normal because those are the prices they have to pay for the expansiveness and the

prosperity of the Dutch Empire.

The Dutch colonizers’ voluntary yielding to the Japanese imperialist control paradoxically

demonstrates the alienation and strangeness implied in the dissemination of colonial cultures. The

Dutch traders on Dejima have no mother country to return to as it is the French flag that flutters

on the Netherlands. Although they do not have fleets or armies to support them in the process of

colonial expansion, they still manage to make colonial profits on the island of strangers because the

strategies they adopt for imperialist plunder are different from the other colonialists, say, the British

and the Portuguese. The Dutch colonial control over Japan is solely built upon the exchange of use

values: they help the shogunate to eliminate the power of Catholic church in exchange for trade

monopoly in Japan. The Dutch imperialist exploitation is also an invention of and an intervention in

Japan’s “cultural abnormality.” They introduce the Dutch study to the closed-off society to ensure

Japan’s dependence on the studies of western science when most European information coming

from whatever source has to filter through the Dutch tongue. On account of this, Rangaku becomes

not only the prevalent appellation for western studies but also the Dutch colonizers’ contrivance

to frustrate Japan’s imperial supremacy. More importantly, the Dutch study provides Japanese

Rangaku scholars, such as the Dutch language translator Sôzaemon Ogawa, “great . . . solace”

when all Japanese are separated from the outer world throughout their lives because those who “plot

to leave” or “leave and return from abroad” would be executed. Ogawa is so envious of Jacob who

may “pass through sea gate [of Dejima] and [go] away, over ocean” that he laments: “My precious


wish is one year in Batavia, to speak Dutch . . . to eat Dutch, to drink Dutch, to sleep Dutch. One

year, just one year . . .” (Mitchell, TAJZ 86-87, emphasis original). Ogawa’s exoticized imagination

and his admiration of everything Dutch, that is, his cultural dislocation, begin as early as he sets

foot on Dejima. As he describes to Jacob his first visit to Dejima:

We walk over Holland Bridge and my master says, “This is longest bridge you ever cross,

because this bridge go between two worlds.” We pass through land gate and I see giant from

story! Nose big like potato! Clotheses with no tie strings but . . . buttons and hair yellow,

like straw! Smell bad, too. Just as astonishment, I first see kuronbô, black boys who skin

like eggplant. Then foreigner opened mouth and say, “Schffgg-evingen-flinder-vasschen-

morgengen!” This was same Dutch I study so hard? (Mitchell, TAJZ 87, emphasis original)

Thanks to his study of the Dutch, Ogawa eventually manages to cross cultural barriers and makes

his exotic imagination a substantial reality. Rangaku is hitherto served as an agglomeration of the

Dutch and the Japanese cultures as the Holland Bridge Ogawa’s path and pass to the world outside

the chained country. The “single-span stone bridge over a moat of tidal mud” (Mitchell, TAJZ 16)

is the “longest” and the most arduous bridge to cross over in terms of geographical distance and

cultural differences. However, the “longest bridge” is intriguingly the shortest cut for the Dutch

colonizers to break through adversities and reach their goal of colonial domination.

Among the mainstreams of Rangaku, the medical science, including botany, pharmacopoeia,

mineralogy, chemistry, physics and zoology, proceeds for some practical considerations. The

Rangaku scholars concentrate their efforts on the aspects of Western technological skill for a

pressing societal need, that is, to prolong and save lives (Goodman 6-7). Another obvious and

immediate application of Rangaku in the pre-modern Japan is the desire for colonial profits. As

it is described in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Jacob brings with him eight crates of

medicinal mercury power from Batavia and sells six of them to Abbot Enomoto, “a moneylender’s

moneylender; a druggist’s druggist” (Mitchell, TAJZ 79), to “generate an income” that might

impress his fiancée’s father (Mitchell, TAJZ 81). He saves two for later after he discovers that

Enomoto is plotting “a temporary monopoly” (Mitchell 78, emphasis original), and the remaining

crates “shall fetch an even higher price, once other traders see the profit that Enomoto earns”

(Mitchell 80, emphasis original). The dealing of mercury not only exposes the trafficking routes/


ruse of the colonial appropriation but also changes the “ethnoscape” of the feudal Japan.6 The

Dutch physicians pass the knowledge that mercury powder can be used as an effective treatment

for venereal disease, which intricately enlarges the population of mixed blood children as results

of temporary marriages between Dutch traders and their Japanese mistresses from teahouses all

over Nagasaki. Another reason for the change of the ethnoscape is the reduction of stillbirths after

western surgical knowledge is applied in delivery. That Orito uses “forceps” to free the umbilical

cord and saves the magistrate’s heir from dying at birth explains the case (Mitchell, TAJZ 7). Those

children born of the Dutch fathers, however, are considered Japanese. Their mothers can raise

them in the houses of their fathers, but “at an early age they [are] subject to restrictions similar to

those imposed on other Japanese in intercourse with foreigners.” As for the Dutch fathers, they are

permitted to “receive occasional visits from their children at certain specified periods and to provide

for their education and support.” If they want to be more attentive, the Dutch fathers can “purchase

for their adult Japanese sons some office under the government at Nagasaki or elsewhere” (Goodman

23). The story of Jacob and his son Yûan elucidates how much the ethnoscape in Nagasaki is

influenced by the Dutch colonial legacy. It also demonstrates that the Dutch colonizer’s “abnormal”

bend on the Japanese imperialist control is as “normal” as a colonialist would do to legitimize

ownership by disparaging the ethnic other as colonial commodities at his disposal.

Yûan is son of Jacob and his mistress Tsukinami who works as the Dutch traders’ temporary

wife at Murayama teahouses. For his son’s education, Jacob takes him to study under the tutelage

of master Shunro to “instill discipline into him” (Mitchell, TAJZ 468). When Yûan stays with

Jacob on Dejima, Dr. Marinus and Eelattu, whose “grasp of anatomy and pathology is second only

to [Marinus’s] (Mitchell, TAJZ 61), teach him western sciences and Jacob even hires a “nanny”

to take care of this illegitimate son. After he moves to his master’s studio, the magistrate allows

　6　The term “ethnoscape” is borrowed from Arjun Appadurai in his “Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (1990). In this article, he establishes five pillars that contribute to the global exchange of ideas and information: ethnoscape, technoscape, finanscape, mediascape, and ideoscape. Among which, the eth-noscpae significantly reflects the Dejima scenario as Appadurai emphasizes that the change of ethnoscape, “the landscape of persons,” refers to the migration of people across cultures and borders, presenting the world and its many communities as mobile and fluid instead of static to an unprecedented degree (297). An example that shows the change of a static society’s ethnoscape is the international marriage. Although Appadurai’s analysis is focused on the world’s state of globalization, of the disjunctiveness people experience in the world of uncertain-ties, I turn to his help for my interpretation of the Dejima story on account that Appadurai’s theory provides a basis for a rudimentary model of disjunctive flows as we attempt to tackle the fractured nature of cultures.


Yûan to visit Jacob on Dejima every tenth day. Even though Jacob dreads the prospect of leaving

his son, “the sunburned Dutchman thinks of a Zeeland winter’s first snowflakes” and longs for “a

ship to arrive from Batavia” to take him home with the fortune he makes on the remote island in

the East (Mitchell, TAJZ 96, 469). “Marooned” on Dejima for seventeen years, Jacob has to launch

for home after his petition to Edo for “permission to settle in Nagasaki as a sort of consul for the

new company” is denied because “no precedent could be found in the archives” (Mitchell, TAJZ

476). Jacob is obligated by a sense of duty, so he leaves Dejima for the next imaginary homeland

where “there’ll be more strangers’ faces than familiar ones,” and “nobody in Veere recognizes

the home-coming Domburger” due to the Napoleonic war and the passage of time (Mitchell,

TAJZ 476, 478). To fulfill his duty, gaijin Jacob cannot but disown his son and leave him, thanks

to Jacob’s occidental blood and the heritage of western civilization, a neither-nor identity and a

“pocket watch” Jacob carries with him as a constant companion in the past years (Mitchell, TAJZ

476). Leaving behind his illegitimate son and the pocket watch, the colonizer hereafter discards his

colonial guilt and his time spent as the enslaved. Yûan’s abject birth is unequivocally derived from

the colonizer’s unscrupulous exercising over the submissive, but Jacob blames the chained society

for such subtle “cultural abnormality” as he tells the Midshipman Boerhaave on his journey home:

“I have no choice. His mother was Japanese, and such is the law. Obscurity is Japan’s outermost

defense. The country doesn’t want to be understood” (Mitchell, TAJZ 477, emphasis original). All

he can do is to pray for Yûan’s life being “better than that of Thunberg’s tubercular son,” though

the ex-chief and apparently Jacob himself too are “well versed in Japan’s distrust of foreign blood.”

Yûan may be his master’s most gifted student, “but he shall never inherit his master’s title, or marry

without the magistrate’s permission, or even leave the wards of the city.” Yûan is doomed to be

ostracized because he is “too Japanese to leave, . . . , but not Japanese enough to belong” (Mitchell,

TAJZ 477, emphasis original). The double negation Yûan suffers from the introduction of Rangaku

makes explicit what Mitchell calls the “differently different cultural abnormality.” It also exposes a

gaijin’s ignoration and his deliberate neglegence of how the locked country proceeds to function in

reality. In the fuduel Japan, the casing of an alien turns “transparent” like a “see-through Swatch.”

The more Jacob tries to cover Yûan’s distress while defending his own grievance against the central

government, the less he would understand the guilt of accomplice enclosed in his involvement of

the colonial appropriation. The gaijin is prone to be deceived by transparency because it helps take

for granted what he sees as the truth in a “built-up” place impregnate with sings and codes that are


“largely” strange to him.

Young Good Man Jacob

Jacob de Zoet’s life on Dejima is as transparent as a “see-through Swatch” as he imagines

himself living in a “half-cracked jade bowl” (Mitchell, TAJZ 16). Serendipitously, such transparency

releases him from self-inflicted misery. Upon arrival, he is quickly involved in a difficult task that

isolates him as an alien. As an employee of the utmost probity, he is required to uncover evidence

of corruption at the trading post of Dejima as devious merchants have been fiddling the books and

stealing goods. A “fastidious clerk of good character . . . who has not abused his advantage over

Anna’s affections,” according to his fiancée’s father (Mitchell, TAJZ 34), Jacob wishes nothing

but to make his name and return home in five years to claim the hand of his Anna. Regrettably,

the casing of the human condition on Dejima is so deluding that “the better” he knows the

imag(i)nation of gaijin, “the less” he understands the world around him because truth is buried in

“a dark joke,” and “joke is secret language . . . inside words,” Orito tells Jacob when she is puzzled

by the Dutch usage of “Robespierre” for scarecrow (Mitchell, TAJZ 127, emphasis original).7

Committing himself to playing “the chief’s ‘loyal secretary’” (Mitchell, TAJZ 39), Jacob helps

record the “drumhead trial” of the acting chief, Daniel Snitker, guilty of “dereliction of duty” due

to his “failure to have the factory’s three senior officers sign the Octavia’s bills of lading,” “theft

of company funds to pay for private cargoes,” and an “attempted bribery of a fiscal comptroller,”

Jacob de Zoet (Mitchell, TAJZ 10-12). Unfortunately, the man who has bestowed that task, Unico

Vorstenbosch, “chief-elect of the trading factory of Dejima in Nagasaki,” deceives Jacob from the

start (TAJZ 11, 170). He even tries to beguile Jacob into self-indulgence of success:

When I met you, De Zoet, . . . , I knew. Here is an honest soul in a swamp of human crocodiles,

a sharp quill among blunt nibs, and a man who, with a little guidance, shall be a chief resident

by thirtieth year! Your resourcefulness this morning saved the company’s money and honor.

Governor-General van Overstraten shall hear about it, I give my word. (Mitchell, TAJZ 98,

7　Robespierre (1758-1794) is a French revolutionary and leader of the Jacobins who was himself executed in a coup d’etat. This piece of information makes Jacob’s answer a dark joke when Orito inquires why scarecrow is “Robespierre”: “Because his head falls off when the wind changes” (Mitchell, TAJZ 127). So is a scarecrow.


emphasis original)

But after Jacob confronts the “incorruptible” Vorstenbosch about his dishonesty, he is right away

isolated, and a gush of alienation oozes when he looks down from the watchtower that:

Citizens of Nagasaki are sitting on their roofs to watch the Dutch ship embark and dream

of its destinations. Jacob thinks of his peers and fellow voyagers from home in Batavia; of

colleagues in various offices during his days as a shipping clerk; of classmates in Middelburg

and childhood friends in Domburg. Whilst they are out in the wide world, finding their paths

and good-hearted wives, I shall be spending my twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth,

twenty-ninth, and thirtieth years—my last best years—trapped in a dying factory with whatever

flotsam and jetsam happen to wash up. (Mitchell, TAJZ 172, emphasis original)

Then he sees Orito Aibagawa, a midwife who bears “a burn covering much of the left side of

her face” (Mitchell, TAJZ 48). She successfully delivers Magistrate Shiroyama’s heir, Nozumi,

so to “study under Dr. Marinus on Dejima” is her reward (Mitchell, TAJZ 55-56). On Dejima,

Orito is “differently different” from the other women who come to the island to either serve at the

Interpreters’ Guild with their labor, or fleece the Dutch merchants with their bodies. Miss Aibagawa,

as Dr. Marinus reprimands Jacob for his oriental fantasy, “is no rented Eve to scratch your itch of

Adam, but a gentleman’s daughter. . . . [E]ven were Miss Aibagawa ‘available’ as a Dejima wife,

. . . which she is not, then spies would report the liaison within a half hour, whereupon my hard-won

rights to teach, botanize, and scholarize around Nagasaki would be withdrawn” (Mitchell, TAJZ 61,

emphasis original). Jacob defends himself by saying that he is simply “a little curious” about one

of the doctor’s students, but Dr. Marinus detects Jacob’s oriental fantasy and scorns at his wish to

“converse with” Orito:

It is not even Miss Aibagawa after whom you lust, in truth. It is the genus “The Oriental

Woman” who so infatuates you. Yes, yes, the mysterious eyes, the camellias in her hair, what

you perceive as meekness. How many hundreds of you besotted white men have I seen mired

in the same syrupy hole? (Mitchell, TAJZ 61)


Jacob denies Dr. Marinus’s judgement of his intention, which incurs even more satirical remarks

from Orito’s mentor:

Naturally, I am wrong: Domburger’s adoration for his Pearl of the East is based on chivalry:

behold the disfigured damsel, spurned by her own race! Behold our Occidental knight, who

alone divines her inner beauty! (Mitchell, TAJZ 62, emphasis original)

But the “lonely” komo knows that he has to see Orito differently (Mitchell, TAJZ 63). Other than

a replacement for his lovesickness of Anna, Orito in the eye of Jacob is like “a book whose cover

fascinates, and in whose pages [he] desire[s] to look a little.” That is all he can ask of Orito (Mitchell,

TAJZ 62). With her fascinating cover and knowledge about Rangaku, the strange midwife subverts

the stereotypical image of Madam Butterfly—a woman who submissively and chastely waits for

the white man to redeem her from miseries (Nagoshi 45). Her strangeness and alienation enable

her to picture “an engraving from that enlightened and barbaric realm, Europe” (Mitchell, TAJZ 5),

and more significantly, imagine Dejima as a place on which she dwells her sense of recognition and

self-formation through her encountering with the “foreign” (Nagoshi 44).

When Jacob watches the Dutch vessel, Shenandoah, vanish in the harbor, he hears a woman’s

strong voice that sounds “angry or frightened or both.” It is Orito arguing with the guards at the land

gate. Out of frustration and anger at his inability to understand the real world, Jacob lies flat on the

platform to avoid her line of vision as she is “brandishing her wooden pass and pointing up Short

Street,” where the clinic is located. Jacob once tried to advance his love by writing Orito a letter to

propose marriage, but now he hesitates because: “She was a fever. . . . The fever is lifted. . . . Can

she be here, he wonders, to seek sanctuary from Enomoto? ” He does not go further for an explicit

answer; instead, he dissuades himself: “She may just be here . . . to visit the hospital . . . . It’s not

you she wants, . . . . It’s incarceration she wants to avoid” (Mitchell, TAJZ 173-74). His sense of

righteousness is so vehement and forcible that Jacob finally musters the courage to rush to the gate,

but everything is too late. The land gate is closed, and Orito is subsequently kidnapped and confined

to a nunnery run by Abbot Enomoto, a powerful and malevolent warlord devoted to a horrific

version of Shinto that involves abuse and murder in the name of a perverse religious dogma. Orito’s

father has died and left large debts, so her stepmother has sold her into a kind of slavery against her

will. As her life and free will are threatened by unknown vicious power, it is the “red-hair” gaijin


she turns to ask for a hand and Dejima, a place of shelter and solace.

Twelve years later, on Dr. Marinus’s funeral, Jacob and Orito, now a respectful surgeon

practicing medicine in Kyoto, reunite. Jacob no longer wishes to spend his life regretting his

cowardice, so he confesses:

On that day, twelve years ago, when Enomoto’s men stole you away, I was on the watchtower,

and I saw you . . . . I saw you trying to persuade the guards at the land gate to let you in.

Vorstenbosch had just betrayed me and, like a sulky child, when I saw you I did nothing. I

could have run down, argued, fussed, summoned a sympathetic interpreter or Marinus . . . but

I didn’t. God knows, I couldn’t guess the consequences of my inaction . . . or that I’d never set

eyes on you again until today—and even that afternoon I came to my senses, but . . . by the

time I’d run down to the land gate to . . . help, I was too late. (Mitchell, TAJZ 470)

Jacob tries to make amends but his remorse remains until the moment when he eventually decides

to plea for Orito’s forgiveness: “I tell you this because—because not to tell you is a lie of omission,

and I cannot lie to you” (Mitchell, TAJZ 471). On hearing this, Orito reconciles with her traumatic

past; she even consulates Jacob by saying:

When pain is vivid, when decisions are keen-edged, we believe that we are the surgeons.

But time passes, and one sees the whole more clearly, and now I perceive us as surgical

instruments used by the world to excise itself of the Order of Mount Shiranui. Had you given

me sanctuary on Dejima that day, I would have been spared pain, yes, but Yayoi would still

be a prisoner there. The creeds would still be enforced. How can I forgive you when you did

nothing wrong? (Mitchell, TAJZ 471)

For the “red-haired barbarian,” Dejima has long been recognized as his home when he settles there

with a Japanese mistress and their alien son. As for the midwife Orito Aibagawa, she also finds her

niche by projecting Dejima as a place where she can rest her sense of alienation and go across the

“longest bridge” with a new identity—Aibagawa-sensei.


Conclusion

Writing as a gaijin in Japan, David Mitchell creates Jacob de Zoet to articulate his sense of

alienation and his imagination of strangers. He intervenes into the history of Dutch merchants on

Dejima to deal with the imag(i)nation of gaijin and the “differently different cultural abnormality”

in his juxtaposition of Rangaku to the appropriation of foreign cultures in pre-modern Japan.

The influence of Rangaku on Ogawa and Aibagawa proves the Dutch colonizer’s strategy of

“differently different colonization” effective as they both find the Dutch study “great solace,”

while its consequences drawn on Yûan an evidence of the colonizer’s willful and unscrupulous

trampling on the submissive. Jacob de Zoet could have arranged a more secured and decent life for

his illegitimate son, say, paying for him a position in an office under the government at Nagasaki,

before he leaves him behind. Regrettably, he leaves him nothing but disgraceful colonial legacy.

After an arduous odyssey, the Dutchman eventually brings home the fortune and fame he swore to

a young woman named Anna, but his intended died of childbirth long ago. On his dying bed, Jacob

re-visions his imaginary homeland and his oriental fantasy:

[Aigabawa Orito] places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.

Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes.

Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows.

A well-waxed paper door slides open. (Mitchell, TAJZ 479)

There he sees the island of strangers and his imag(i)nation of gaijin on “The Land of a Thousand

Autumns.”

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(Department of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics at National Taipei University)

Kobe University Repository : Kernel · Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland 45 of Japan’s traditional images” (Nihei 98), while Murakami represents Western pop culture elements through

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