Trade, Love, Betrayal and Divorce:

Tales From the Sasebo Area

YCAPS is excited to announce our next event in Sasebo. This event will feature Mr. Leonard Blussé who will lead us in a talk on Trade, Love, Betrayal and Divorce: Tales From the Sasebo Area.

Fifty years ago, when he was a research student at Kyoto University, Leonard Blussé happened to meet a retired and slightly bored Japanese gentleman from the Kobe area who owned a beautiful 40-foot yawl. Mr Kidena was in desperate need of crew to accompany him on his cruises around Japan's inner sea, the Seto Naikai, and beyond. On board Minerva II, Mr. Blussé was able to visit many interesting historical sites, including the island of Hirado near Sasebo. In the exhibition of the local tourist museum, he discovered a bundle of letters written by an exiled daughter to her Japanese mother. It turned out that Otemba Cornelia was one of the children of mixed marriages who were expelled when Japan closed its borders some four hundred years ago.

This serendipitous discovery gave birth not only to a book, Bitter Bonds, but also to his enduring interest in the first decades of the seventeenth century, when in Hirado, Chinese, English and Dutch merchants mingled freely with Japanese samurai, smugglers and adventurers, and settled down to marry Japanese women. In Mr. Blussé’s talk, he hopes to introduce you to some of these colorful characters, who, like William Adams, not only live on in the blockbuster tv series Shogun, but, like Coxinga alias Zheng Chenggong, are even part of the contemporary debate about Taiwan's place in East Asia.

All are welcome and free food and refreshments will be provided.

Please use this link to register for the event. (optional)

Schedule:

• 17:45-18:30 - Welcome reception (food & drinks). Feel free to show up anytime during the reception.
• 18:30-19:45 - Seminar and Q&A.
• 19:45-20:00 - Optional casual networking and chatting/wrap up.

Location:

Machinaka Community Center

5-5 Tokiwacho, Sasebo, Nagasaki 857-0053

Google Map

Speaker:

Leonard Blussé (包乐史) (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) is Professor of History of Asian-European Relations, at Leiden University. He studied Sinology at Leiden University, followed by two years of Anthropology at National Taiwan University, and three years of historical research at Kyoto University. Between 1977 and 2011 he taught at Leiden University and was awarded one year research scholarships at Princeton University 1990-1, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Research (2000-01). He taught as guest professor of History at Harvard University (2005-6) and Kyoto University (2012-13). He supervised 43 completed PhD thesis and is the author and editor of some thirty books and a 100 scholarly articles. Most of Blussé’s work concerns the maritime history of Southeast and East Asia and the history of overseas Chinese. Together with Willem Remmelink and a team of collaborators he edited the so-called marginalia edition of the Deshima Diaries (1640-1800). Among his book publications figure: The Chinese Annals of Batavia, Kaiba Lidai Shiji, and other stories (1610-1795), Leiden: Brill 2018. Visible Cities, Batavia, Canton and Nagasaki and the Coming of the Americans, Harvard UP 2008 Bitter Bonds, A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. 2002. Strange Company, Leiden/Boston: KITLV Press 1986.

Event Cost: Free of charge

Location: Machinaka Community Center, 5-5 Tokiwacho, Sasebo, Nagasaki 857-0053

Google Maps: Here

Moderator: William Yale

Language: English

Registration: Optional via this link.