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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of New Books on Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I am your host today, Jeannie B from the University of Arizona. In today's episode, we have Professor Christopher Joby with us to talk about his new book, The Dutch Language in Japan, a Cultural and Social Linguistics Study of Dutch as a Contact Language in Tokugawa in Medjid, Japan. Dr.
Joby is a historian of language currently at academia's in Ika. This book is a systematic analysis of the ways that the Dutch language circulated, influenced, and was influenced by the Japanese language, as well as other languages that were used in Tokugawa, Japan. The Netherlands was one of the few places that maintained trading relationships with early modern Japan, and the Dutch language thus played a very important role in the circulation of information. Welcome to new books on Japanese Studies, Professor Joby.
Thank you very much, thanks for having me. Thank you. From this book, I get the impression that your expertise is also in European languages, and I know that you speak or you use many different kinds of languages. So what's your background like, and how did you become interested in the history of the Dutch language in Japan?
Good questions. I love languages. I've studied quite a few languages over my career. My first degree was actually in Arabic and Turkish, which you believe, so a little different from this.
But I come from East England, and that historically has got a lot of contact with the low countries, and we used to go on holiday to Belgium, to Brücker when I was young. And the Belgians, as the Dutch, could speak English well, so I thought, oh, why don't I learn their language? So I bought a book, teach yourself Dutch, and started learning the Dutch language. I studied German, which is closely related to Dutch, so that helped my Dutch.
So I've always had this passion for Dutch, and when I was doing my PhD, I was actually studying theology. How do we get from theology to Dutch in Japan? Let me try and tell you. So I was doing my PhD and had the Rasmus Exchange in Amsterdam, where I was able to study the work of Rembrandt and Dutch artists, and that really fired up my lifelong interest in Dutch game.
And I competed in my PhD in theology, but at a certain point decided I actually wanted to follow the Dutch language and teach the Dutch language. So that kind of got me into teaching Dutch and being involved in that. And your second question, I think, was about how I got into Dutch in Japan? Yes.
Well, that's another interesting part of the story. I was teaching Dutch, I had some part-time jobs in the UK, but in 2013 I got a job teaching Dutch in South Korea. And I took that. I'd never been to South Korea, but I thought that was interesting.
And while I was there, I had to teach on the history of the Dutch in East Asia, and that necessarily brought me into contact with the VOC, the Dutch India Company. And I got to know that Dutch had had quite a lot of trading activity in Japan. And one thing led to another, and I found an interesting website on the National Diet Library site about Prangakul, the study of Dutch in Japan. And I was absolutely fascinated by that, what happens when one language meets another, when one culture meets another.
I think that's at the core of the work that I do. And I found out that no one had really written a book about the Dutch language in Japan. I thought, okay, let's do it. If I'd realised what an immense task it was, then I might have decided my time was better spent elsewhere, but I'm very glad I did.
And seven years later I produced this book. That's amazing. Everyone who would read this book, I think they would all be grateful for your expense on the Dutch language in Japan. So of all these languages that you can speak or use, do you have a favourite one?
Well, it is Dutch, funnily enough. I say funnily enough because certainly in English-speaking world, not many people learn Dutch in part because of Dutch and Flemish, typically speak very good English. But I've just always had this love for Dutch, trying to analyse why that is not easy. I think it's a part because it's kind of like English, but it's kind of not like English if you like.
So it's like a close cousin you get on with rather than a distant relative if you like. And yeah, so I love Dutch, but I love all languages. I love Italian. I love Spanish Portuguese, Slavic languages.
But you have to focus on one area, one language, I think, to really make progress in your academic career. So at a certain point I decided I had to give up some of those languages, if you like, particularly Italian in order to focus on Dutch. But I guess this book has allowed me to come back into contact with languages that I'd had to put to one side, like Portuguese, for example, German in the later part of the story in French. And that was a technique interesting part of the story, the fact that we perhaps aren't aware of how many European or Western languages were used in Japan at certain points in history.
That's truly amazing, and I definitely think it's all reflected in this book. Great, thank you. So since we're talking about the use and influence of language to get into your book, how did the Japanese learn Dutch and how did the Dutch learn Japanese? Okay, well I'll answer the second one first because that's a bit more straightforward.
Technically the Dutch were prohibited from learning Japanese. Some did do so. You know, there are these provisions but then there are ways around the provisions where that involves bribes or not who knows. But some of the Dutch clearly did learn some Japanese.
Typically they were intellectuals. I think of Isaac Titzing, for example. He was the captain of the Dutch trading post at Déchima in the second half of the 18th century. And he'd studied at Lyon University, clearly a very intelligent man, and he built up a network of Japanese intellectuals samurai with whom he corresponded.
And typically they corresponded in Dutch, but you know, he asked them questions about Japanese from his archives. We see that he was practicing writing in kanji. So, you know, he wouldn't necessarily have been using it in every day conversation, but certainly had acquired some knowledge of Japanese. Others such as Engelbert Kentfuh, the German physician in the late 17th century, also acquired some Japanese.
And then Philip von Zebot, perhaps the most famous of the physicians on Déchima, clearly learned some Japanese as well. So that's side of things. On the one hand prohibited, but on the other hand, some Dutch were clearly learning. Some had to leave, actually, some Dutch in the 17th century were asked to leave by the Japanese authorities because their Japanese was too good.
The reason for that, without being too cynical, is probably because I would argue that the Japanese authorities wanted to have interpreters as middlemen between the Dutch traders and the Japanese merchants and intellectuals, who they were dealing with. And that allowed them to gain information about what the Dutch were up to, so you could see them perhaps as spies by another name. So I think that's part of the reason for that. Now, going the other way, that's a more complex story.
And in the book, I use the phrase kate steps. I think it's one way you can translate that. And I see the way in which the Japanese acquired the knowledge of Dutch as a series of steps, sometimes forwards, sometimes a little sideways occasionally, backwards. But you can see a clear trajectory over time of how the Japanese learned Dutch, and that became more sophisticated.
So they would begin in the first instance by learning by rote from other Japanese. And they were often complaints by the Dutch that the pronunciation of the Dutch by the Japanese wasn't particularly clear, let's say. And that has much to do with the different sound system that Japanese has from Dutch. So they started by learning rote by rote, but that didn't necessarily help them with the understanding of Dutch.
So one can imagine that there was quite a bit of miscommunication going on. We have wordlists from the 17th, 18th century, and they are often in the Aroha sequence. We haven't yet got to alphabetical or European alphabetical wordlists or lexicons at this point. So they're compiling wordlists to learn the words to communicate with the Dutch.
The next phase is really sort of discursive spaces where Japanese would gather together, for example, in the house of Katte-Lagara, Hoshul in Edel or Yoshio Koki in Nagasaki. And they exchanged information about the Dutch, about Dutch things. They were crazy about Dutch things. And because they couldn't leave Japan, they had to talk amongst themselves and occasionally try and drag in some Dutch people to help them with their Dutch.
So we're actually seeing a development and sophistication of the spaces in which the Japanese are learning. And then you start to get, should you go private schools being set up in the late 18th century, 19th century, where Japanese are being taught not only the Dutch language, but also about Dutch learning in fields such as medicine, chemistry, physics. So you can actually see a progression over time with an increased sophistication, and then you've also got an increased sophistication in the materials. So you start with these simple wordlists.
At this point, there's no real grammar of the Dutch language in Japanese. Towards the end of the 18th century, you get a quantum step forward, particularly for the translators, where you've got the Harumat dictionaries. So in the middle of the 18th century, the Dutch imported bilingual French Dutch dictionaries called Halma by Francois Halma, a Dutch photographer of French descent. So the Japanese intellectuals were using these bilingual French Dutch dictionaries to create bilingual Japanese Dutch dictionaries.
And what you also see is that there's a shift in terms of the Dutch being put on the left if you like, so people are able to look up the Dutch word in alphabetical order and then find the Japanese equivalent. And that really helps translation a great deal, because you can imagine trying to translate when you're having to look up the Japanese word first, even though you're translating from Dutch into Japanese. So you've got these Halma dictionaries, the Edo Haruma, and then another one, which was mainly produced by the Dutch Oberhoft Hendrik, Duf, sometimes known as the Zufu Haruma. And in contrast to the Edo Haruma, you've got a native speaker there.
And he was able to add a lot of Dutch phrases to his Halma, his Mexican, sorry. And perhaps finally on that one, you do have a development of Japanese grammars of Dutch. So there's a Dutch grammar by Sewell, the Willem Sewell, which was used as the basis for Japanese grammars, like Yakiniki's to the language. So in the 19th century, sorry, you see a development of grammars and even guides on pronunciation.
So by the mid-19th century, you've really got quite a complex picture of learning materials for the Japanese to learn Dutch. That's quite fascinating. And now that you spoke of translation of Dutch knowledge, I was recently reading a very interesting book on the Langaku Network, Inteoku by Japan, and how translations of Dutch books spread. So from your cultural and social linguistics perspective, how was the Dutch language used in Japan by Japanese people, like in what fields were they used?
And how would you describe the process that they translated these knowledge, other than the dictionaries you just mentioned? Sure. I think again we can talk in terms of steps. So in 1640, 1650s, you've got surgeons in Deshima.
And what the surgeons are doing, which is what Chinese trained or Chinese medicine trained Japanese physicians are not doing, is opening up the body, is surgery. And they can see that the Dutch physicians are able to cure patients in a way that Chinese medicine was not able to. And that's happening quite early on. And a key moment is in 1650 where you have a German physician in Edel, who manages to cure one of the courteas of the choket of what was it, of some disease which the gout, that's right, it was gout, is able to cure the quality of gout which the Chinese physicians had not been able to using their approach to medicine, which is more holistic.
So quite early on in the story, the Japanese see that Dutch surgery medicine has something to offer them. In the first instance, translations, and we need to understand the word translation quite broadly here often involves noting down the oral instructions of the surgeon and then translating those instructions into Japanese. Over time, became Dutch physicians produce notes that the Japanese translate. And then we start to get Dutch books being imported on medicine and those being translated into Japanese.
And a book by Adam Coolness, which was originally written in Latin, was translated into Japanese as kai tai shinsou, shinsou, sorry. And that was a key moment because that included people like Suki te gen pakkou and Maenor Ryok pakkou. And they recorded the process by which they translated Dutch into Japanese. So you get a real insight into the problems that they experienced.
How do you translate a word like nerve into Japanese when you haven't seen a nerve before? So you get a real insight into the troubles that they had translating from Dutch to Japanese. But over time, as I say, shijukul private schools were set up for the study of Dutch medicine, Van Poel, and that clearly, they probably ran into their thousands, the number of Japanese who were studying Dutch. And then they would often return to their domain where they came from and practice the Dutch medicine.
So if you like the Dutch language, Dutch knowledge was spreading throughout Japan. And when I say Dutch, again, I have to be a bit careful because some of the physicians, as I've already suggested with German, there was Swedish physicians as well. And they know how it was really more Western rather than specifically Dutch, but Dutch was the medium through which this knowledge was transmitted. And I coined the word metalext in the book to talk about Dutch as a conveyor, a transmitter of information.
So medicine was one area, another area was astronomy. So the telescope was an important step forward in astronomy, obviously, in Europe, that happened in about 1610 in the Dutch Republic. So clearly the Dutch were able to see the stars, see the sky much better than their Japanese counterparts. And they were able to contribute to producing better calendars for the Japanese, and that helped in terms of agriculture, so you'll see when to harvest, et cetera.
Often, I think, if you vote something up very well, the Japanese translated what they needed to translate. It wasn't a case of the Dutch coming along and saying, oh, we've got these books, would you like to translate them? It's a case of the Japanese saying, oh, you do it that way, do you? Or, OK, you have these insights.
We want to know more about that. And sometimes that would lead to a paradigm shift. I think, for example, of botany in the 18th century, Carleneius developed the binomial system for plant classification. Up to that point, both in Europe and in Japan, plants had often been classified by characteristics, such as what could they cure.
But Linneus introduced a much more systematic approach, which also ensured that people didn't confuse plants. One could be poisonous, one not. I don't know what I'm dealing with here, OK? So he introduced that in Latin, but obviously it was the Dutch who was introducing that into Japan.
One of his disciples, Carl Thunberg, was a physician in Japan. He collected specimens of Japanese plants and published a book, Japonica, on Japanese plants using the binomial system developed by Linneus. And Philip von Zebolt, he taught at his private academy, the Nada Takachoko. And one of his students was Ivo Kesuke.
And he was sometimes seen as the father of Japanese botany, very important figure there. And he is again using the name binomial species genus system. So in a whole range of intellectual areas, the Dutch are making contributions to Japan. But it's important to stress it's the Japanese who are designing what they need rather than if you like the Dutch pushing it.
Well, you raised so many interesting points, some of which I definitely would like to come back to here. But although the main discussion of this book is about the Dutch language, as you just mentioned, there were other languages using Japan. What were they and were they used as, this might be repeating what we were talking about bits, but were they used with these other languages using the same fields as Dutch was? And were they learned in the same ways as Dutch was?
Okay, I think we can analyze that in sort of three stages. When Dutch arrived, if you like, and I perhaps go a bit too far into the book, but I try to make Dutch almost a person arriving on the shores of Japan and in 1600. And then asking what happens next? But when the Dutch language came to Japan, Portuguese was already quite well established as the main European language in Japan.
This had partly to do with the provocation of Christianity by Portuguese, but also Spanish and other Catholic missionaries. But also trade, the Portuguese acted as intermediaries between Japan and China because China had prohibited official trade between the two countries. And Portugal took on the role of commercial intermediaries there. So Portuguese was quite well established in Japan, certainly for intellectual life, but also for religious life.
And of course Latin was used, the mass was celebrated in Japan in Latin. But as we all know, towards the end of the 16th century, the Japanese authorities started to clamp down on Christianity and eventually in 1639, all the Portuguese were expelled after the Shimabada, Shimaboda, and rebellion. And but after that, even though there weren't any Portuguese left in Japan, the Portuguese persisted as a language, certainly into the 18th century. And we can ask why was that?
Well, it was clearly already well established. Some people already spoke Portuguese, so they were unwilling to switch to it. It's likely that certainly in the 1640, 1650s, that when Dutch spoke to Japanese, they would use Portuguese interpreter, which one can imagine led to various bits of miscommunication. So Portuguese persisted, but eventually in about 1670, the governor of Nagasaki started to send interpreters to the Dutch to learn Dutch.
And so Portuguese really starts to decline after that time. But well into the 17th century, Japanese intellectuals are asking the Dutch for Portuguese, not Dutch books. So clearly Portuguese persists, and you can see it as a competitor to Dutch in early Tokugawa, Japan. In the 18th century, there are few other European languages in Japan, so that's really when Dutch shines.
If you like, Dutch brings with it Latin, and occasionally Japanese translators need to translate from Latin into Japanese. She's a good example of that, but he somehow managed to find a Latin Dutch dictionary to translate a couple of verses of Latin poetry into Japanese. But also, Dutch is competing or has contact with Chinese in the sense that it's up to this point, Japanese intellectual life is primarily framed by Chinese learning, particularly in the fields of medicine. And so in some sense, Dutch is competing with Chinese as the language of medicine.
Clearly Chinese is much more widely known than Dutch at this point, but that doesn't stop Dutch from making some inroads into what's up to that point being primarily a Chinese language. And then we go into the 19th century, and I think 1808 was it the Phaiton affair was a key turning point. This was the period of Saccocco, Japan wasn't completely closed, but it was open in a very limited way. But in 1808, the Phaiton gets into Nagasaki harbour, and the alarm bells start reading because the Japanese are aware that that shouldn't have happened, and they think they need to start learning some other languages.
They get reports, the full sets of gakki, and they're probably coming to a realisation that there are other countries who present a threat from the North. You've already got Russian ships being sighted of Northern Japan, and Russian ships indeed come to Nagasaki to try and open up trade between Russia and Japan. So the Japanese authorities realise that the interpreters need to learn other languages apart from Dutch. They learn English, they learn French to a lesser extent, and there's private learning of German as well.
So in the final part of the story, which I look into in chapter eight, but also in chapter four, I look at how English and French gradually dislodged Dutch, particularly from the intellectual domain. But by early Mayji, Dutch has pretty much disappeared from the scene, certainly as a language wide communication in Japan. Now the key concept of your book is indicated in the title, Contact Language. So this process that you just described how the Dutch language was used as the medium for the English language.
The medium for the Japanese and people from other countries of other languages to communicate is this what contact language means? Good question. I've probably interpreted it quite broadly to bring these other languages into the story. Effectively, technically speaking, one can define a contact language as a language that operates in the same sociosemiotic space as other languages, but that obviously needs a bit of unpacking.
I guess one can imagine it that if you've got a group of people speaking one language who are in close contact with a group of people speaking another language, then you have the beginnings of Dutch or a language as a contact language. And the question is what happens next? As those two groups, let's say the Dutch and the Japanese in Nagasaki, start to communicate, they realize they haven't necessarily got all the words they need to communicate. So they start borrowing or switching into the other languages, so particularly Japanese is borrowing from Dutch.
They might say, what's that? And the Dutch say it's coffee. We call it coffee, which might be a bit difficult for Japanese to say. So eventually that becomes coffee.
So then you've got the beginning of loan words. A big part of this story hasn't necessarily got to do with people speaking different languages and coming into the same area, but it's to do with translation. So the Japanese translators are coming into contact with Dutch in books. They want to understand them, so they need to translate them and use their dictionaries to do so.
In discussing the previous question, I was really talking in terms of competition. You've got those two groups of speakers who might just swap words here and there, but at a certain point one group might think it's better. It's language is more powerful in some way. And so that one language, A, starts to dislodge language B.
And that was certainly happening at the beginning of the story where Dutch eventually dislodges Portuguese. And at the end of the story where English and French and German dis-lodge Dutch. So when there's languages coming to contact, there's often an element of competition. So that's part of contact.
But it's also about syntactic interference. What do I mean by that? I mean, particularly in terms of translation, in order for people speaking language A to be able to translate from language B into language A, they may lack grammatical structures which they feel they need in order to capture the full meaning of the source text. So they may need to invent new syntax or reuse particles in different ways to adequately represent what's in the source text.
And there are a few examples in the book of particles such as Niotte, which are being reused by Japanese translators to bridge that syntactic gap, if you like. And another final aspect perhaps of this language contact is that sometimes it results in a shift in script. I don't think that's typically discussed in, if you like, classic studies of language contact. But in this case, I wanted to talk about the fact that you've got two such different scripts.
You've got, you know, Japanese with its kanji and its hilogana and its katagana. And then you've got this Dutch alphabetic system, which is based on sound phonology. And some Japanese found that to be, you know, a simple way of writing and even advocated leaving, leaving behind the traditional writing system and moving to Roman script. The Japanese, sorry, the Portuguese had in the 1600s had developed a transcription system of Japanese.
So that could have been used, something like that could have been used to transcribe Japanese, the Japanese sounds into a Roman alphabet. But on the other hand, you had Japanese who didn't like the foreign influence that was being inserted and they saw the writing of Japanese in a foreign script as a step too far. So they certainly rejected this barbarian script, you know, like people writing sideways. So they eventually won the day, but there were certainly discussions around whether Japanese should be written in Roman script.
So yeah, there are different ways. There's no word borrowing, there's syntactic interference and on occasion graphic interference as a result of that language contact. That's absolutely fascinating. And as I was reading your book, I noticed that you quoted Peter Burke a lot.
Now, I am a big fan of Peter Burke myself. I find his works on popular culture to be very useful when I analyze the culture history of early modern Japan. So can you voice out their purpose? Could you talk more about how Peter Burke's works can be inspiring for your, for this study on the Dutch language in Japan?
Lovely question. Thank you. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Peter Burke's work. I typically find that when I want to study a new subject, whatever it is, Peter Burke's been there before.
Myself, I wrote a book on multilingualism in the Dutch Republic, which was published in 2014, and Peter Burke had written about a sort of cultural history of Dutch language in the early modern period. And that really helped me think about the subject in a very productive way. I think what I like particularly about Peter Burke's work is that he frames the subject using opposite phrases. He helps to sum up the main idea in a very good way.
So one example would be cultural go between. I like that idea. Someone's with a footing to cultures and enabling cultural transfer from one culture to another and also linguistic transfer. And that was a particularly productive phrase for me to use in this book.
He's done a lot of work on translation. He's an early modernist. And I guess that's one of the caps that I wear. He's written on translation in early modern Europe.
And I felt when I was discussing translation in Top of Goa, Japan, that it would be useful to frame that discussion in similar terms to the way in which Peter Burke had discussed translation in early modern Europe, asking deceptively simple questions like who was translating, how were they translating? What was the effect of this translation on border society? So yeah, I really like the way that Peter Burke frames the discussions that he has about cultural history. And also the fact that he's an early modernist means he's often been there before myself, which is very helpful.
So you mentioned earlier in a conversation that there hasn't been, there haven't been a lot of scholarships on this topic because of the difficulty of dealing with multiple languages. So moving towards the end of a conversation, I have one last question for you. Now that you have dealt with almost all the technical issues on Dutch as a contact language in Japan in this book, what are your next steps and how does this project fit in your entire broader interest of research? Okay, thank you for that.
Just before I answer that question, if I just may make a quick plug for the listeners, the book, the Dutch language in Japan 1600 to 1900, is available via the real website. And listeners to the podcast can get a 50% discount on the book if they purchase it for themselves or for their institution by 31st of May. And they need to include the discount code 7215072150. So hopefully that will inspire a few purchases of the book.
Then to come to your question, what are my next steps? Well, I'm currently in Taiwan. And I'm here on a fellowship to study the reception of the Christian gospel in Taiwan. And as I occasionally surprise my Taiwanese friends, I tell them that the Dutch were the first Europeans to come to Taiwan in 1624.
And they came to trade, but also with the purpose of converting the indigenous Formosins to Christianity. Spanish also came to Taiwan as a sort of counter move in the ATS war. And they also fought with the missionaries who converted Northern Formosins. So I look in that book at how the European missionaries tried to bridge what was quite immense, cultural and linguistic gap between their own cultures, you know, informed by Judaeo Christianity, by pagan classical worlds, by the Renaissance, how they fought the Christian gospel and tried to communicate the Christian gospel to the Formosins, who of course would never have heard of the gospel who spoke completely different languages to the Dutch and Spanish.
So that's really, if you like, a case study of reception, but it still somehow involves the Dutch. And then sort of at the other end of the Eurasian continent, I'm up to straighten another book on an Anglo-Dutch poet who lived in my hometown of Norwich in the 17th century. And I look at how he formed his literary identity and his military identity, various identities in early modern England. So that book really focuses on questions of identity formation.
So that's, you know, there's two projects which I'm currently involved in. Lastly, I guess going back to Japan, I would certainly like to do further research in Japan. When you're kind of produced a big book like that, you perhaps need to take a little break, do something else, and then come back to that subject with, you know, fresh, enthusiasm. But although I've covered, I'd say quite a bit of ground, there is still more to do, I think, in Rangakul, particularly in Western languages.
And this is the challenge on this particular subject, in that there are books on certain things in Japanese, but not in Western languages and vice versa. But there's certainly more work to do on Rangakul in a Western language. And perhaps also looking at the story of Christianity in Topagawa, Japan. And while researching this book, I was very aware that despite the sort of received wisdom that Christianity was banned and was practicing it, well, actually, there was quite a lot of activity going on.
Certainly there were Christian books being imported, even though that was technically illegal. So that's certainly a story I'd like to look at more deeply time permitting. I think it's truly amazing, truly incredible how all these projects are drastically different, but then they connect in some way. It's, it's, it sounds really amazing.
Thank you so much for your time and for this wonderful conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Fadni. Thank you listeners for joining us to find out more about the interactions between Dutch and Japanese.
Make sure you check out this new book, the Dutch language in Japan. And you can find the promotion link, the promotion code in the description of this book above. This is Jing Yi from New Books on Japanese Studies. I will see you in our next episode.
Until then, goodbye.