Binnenkant And Buitenkant : The Crucial Importance of the Dutch Eyewitness Accounts of Japan for Tokugawa History and Historiography

In the last decade or so, a discussion was started among a small number of early modern Japan specialists (1603–1868, the Edo or Tokugawa period) about a new way to read the Japanese language sources that record the facts of this timeframe by distinguishing between the omote (public) aspect of the information preserved and its naishō (confidential) counterpart which usually remained unrecorded. What is most exciting about this new way of reading these Japanese sources is that it is being pioneered by non-Japanese historians with very little input from their Japanese colleagues. In this article, I review why it has taken so long to arrive at this new reading method and how sources compiled by outsiders on the artificial island of Deshima (Dejima) in the Bay of Nagasaki are crucial for understanding the proper way of reading and evaluating Tokugawa history, Tokugawa record keeping, and Tokugawa historiography.