Second Decade

In the Second Decade, Japan was the most exotic, unknown and isolated country in the world. Since the early 17th century the Tokugawa Shoguns had deliberately closed the country to trade and cultural exchange with the rest of the globe, wanting especially to avoid the religious influences of European countries. Japan’s only outlet to Western trade was a trading post on a tiny island in Nagasaki harbor. In 1817, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Holland sent a new director-general to Nagasaki, who did a daring thing that had never been done before: he brought his family with him. This was how Titia Bergsma Blomhoff, a frail woman in ill health with a young baby clinging to her, wound up in Japan, together with her nurse, Petronella Munts. Their presence triggered a diplomatic incident and perhaps hammered a crack in Japan’s façade of isolation that was to break wide open later in the 19th century. In this episode, Dr. Sean Munger explains who Titia Bergsma was, how she came to be married to Holland’s informa