From Dejima to the Jordaan
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For two hundred years, during Japan's period of sakoku — the closed-country policy that sealed the archipelago from almost all foreign contact — the Dutch were the exception.
Not because Japan trusted the Dutch especially. But because the Dutch, through the VOC, had demonstrated a particular quality the Japanese found useful: they came to trade, not to convert. They brought goods, not theology. And so, on the small artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour — a trading post barely the size of a city block — the Dutch East India Company maintained the only Western foothold in Japan for over two centuries.
It is an extraordinary fact of history that while Europe was industrialising, while empires were expanding, while the world was being redrawn by force, the primary conduit between Japan and the West was a small wooden island in a harbour, trading lacquerware, copper, and silk.
The Dutch brought to Japan: clocks, telescopes, anatomical knowledge, printing technology. Japan sent back through Dejima: porcelain, lacquer, copper — and silk. The silk that arrived in Amsterdam from Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had already travelled centuries of refinement: the particular lustre of Nishijin weaving, the controlled geometry of ceremonial obi, the metallic thread techniques that no European loom had yet developed.
Renaras was founded in Amsterdam — in the Jordaan district, once the home of the textile trade that flourished partly through that same VOC connection. The link between the Dutch mercantile tradition and Japanese craft is not incidental to what we do. It is the origin of it. Explore the Japanese Silk Wall Art collection →