Rare first and only Dutch edition of Lindau's description of Japan. Rudolf Lindau (1829-1910) discusses Nagasaki (including Dejima), Manchuria, Edo and Yokohama, with extensive remarks on Japanese politics and culture, including a detailed account of a sumo wrestling match. Writing during the so-called "Bakumatsu" (the late Tokugawa Shogunate), the author devotes three chapters to the Japanese political associations and networks after Commodore Matthew Perry signed the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa, which would eventually lead to the Meiji Restoration.
The tinted lithograph of a house on the title-page explicitly states that is was made after a photograph. A Nagasaki merchant imported a daguerreotype camera to Japan in 1848, but it was only in the 1850s that westerners began making photographs in Japan and most of the early ones are lost. The present lithograph therefore gives us some visual record of one of the earliest photographs.
The present Dutch edition contains a preface by Nisi Sioesoeke, better known as Nishi Amane (1829-1897), who had been sent to Leiden in 1862 to study law, economics and military science, and would later become a major figure in promoting western philosophy and Enlightenment in Japan. Here, he testifies that Lindau's work, in sharp contrast with those that came before, is largely "very accurate and in agreement with the truth", though he notes it is "not entirely free of errors on political matters" and the rendering of some Japanese words with the Latin alphabet.
Owner's stamp on title-page. With occasional minor and mostly marginal foxing, but still in good condition and untrimmed. Spine reinforced with brown paper, boards slightly foxed and worn, later endpapers. Hesselink, 333 years of Dutch publications on Japan V-B 118; NCC (8 copies); WorldCat (4 copies); cf. Cordier, Japonica, cols. 554-555.