Suchergebnisse

Introduction / Martha Chaiklin -- Unexpected paths: gift giving and the Nara excursions of the Muromachi shoguns / Kaneko Hiraku, translated by Lee Butler -- Gifts for the emperor: signposts of continuity and change in Japan's fifteenth and sixteenth centuries / Lee Butler -- Physician Yamashina Tokitsune's healing gifts / Andrew Edmund Goble -- Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and the formation of Edo Castle: rituals of giving / Cecilia Segawa Seigle -- Mitsui Echigoya's gifts to the Tokugawa Shogunate / Ozawa Emiko, translated by Lee Butler -- Travel and gift exchange in nineteenth-century Japan / Laura Nenzi -- Gift exchange and reciprocity: understanding antiquarian/ethnographic communities within and beyond Tokugawa borders / Margarita Winkel

The so-called opening of Japan is often seen as a victory for American gunboat diplomacy, accomplished through the expert negotiations of Commodore Matthew Perry. The successful conclusion of this action was the beginning of an American presence in the Pacific. The Dutch, who had trading relations with Japan since 1609, are seen as irrelevant, generally vilified, or despised as weak. This article draws on primarily Dutch archival sources to demonstrate that the Dutch in fact skillfully navigated very rough diplomatic waters and smoothed the American treaty process with the Tokugawa shogunate.

In Sri Lanka elephants are endangered and ivory carving, as an art, is dead. Sri Lanka was once famous for the number and quality of its elephants, whose tusks were carved and exported since ancient times. Although Sri Lanka became, successively, a pivotal outpost for the Portuguese, Dutch and English, details about the Ceylonese ivory trade appear in trade documents only rarely. And yet, if information is not to be found there, does that mean ivory trade did not occur? Trade documents, after all, do not tell the whole story. Smugglers, illegal traders, big game hunters and plantation owners all played a part in the disappearance of elephants and its corollary, the ivory trade. When archival evidence is viewed in combination with physical evidence and the anecdotes of visitors and residents, it becomes evident that ivory remained an integral part of trade and crafts in Ceylon well into the last century.