This is the history of Dutch influence on Japan during the so-called 'closed centuries' between 1640 and 1853. Dutch maritime traders provided the only commercial link which Japan maintained with the west, and were thus the sole channel for western ideas and knowledge to reach neo-Confucian society. Professor Goodman explains the circumstances of the Dutch themselves in Japan during the seventeenth century, and the historical and intellectual milieu within which 'Dutch studies' were nurtured. He traces the initial interest of the Shogun government in European astronomy and medicine, and the gradual development of interest in wider spheres of western knowledge and culture.

In The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900) Christopher Joby offers the first book-length account of the knowledge and use of the Dutch language in Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, which had a profound effect on Japan’s language, society and culture.

This revision of Professor Goodman's earlier work, The Dutch Impact on Japan, originally published in 1967, was brought up-to-date with much new information in 1986 in response to renewed interest in the Dutch influence on Japan during the so-called 'closed centuries' between 1640 and 1853. Professor Goodman explains the circumstances of the Dutch in Japan during the seventeenth century, and the historical and intellectual milieu within which 'Dutch studies' were nurtured. He traces the initial interest of the Shogun government in European astronomy and medicine, and the gradual development of interest to wider spheres of Western knowledge and culture. First published in 1986, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.

Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

Some vols. include the museum's Annual report.

In this definitive study of the intra-Asian trade in Japanese copper trade by the Dutch East India Company, the author argues that the trade in this commodity reaped high profits. Despite the huge imports of British copper by the English East India Company during the eighteenth century, the Dutch Company successfully continued to sell Japanese copper in South Asia at higher prices. Compared to the capital-intensive development of British mines in the age of the Industrial Revolution, the copper production in Tokugawa Japan was characterized by a labour-intensive 'revolution' which also made a big impact on the local economy.

The Dutch East India Company was a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state that attempted to thrust itself aggressively into an Asian political order in which it possessed no obvious place and was transformed in the process. This study focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa Japan over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. In each encounter the Dutch were forced to retreat, compelled to abandon their claims to sovereign powers, and to refashion themselves again and again—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial sovereignty to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. Within the confines of these conflicts, the terms of the relationship between the company and the shogun first took shape and were subsequently set into what would become their permanent form. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company in Japan as something more than just a commercial organization, The Company and the Shogun presents new perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting relationships to develop between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise.