Nagasaki, Japan – For 220 years, between 1641 and 1853, Dejima Island was Japan’s only window to the world. All of her ports, indeed the entire country was intentionally isolated by the Tokugawa shogunate, forbidding any Japanese contact with Westerners and Asians except through this island. Dejima, the Japanese word for “exit island” was itself artificial, formed by digging a canal to separate a section of a small peninsula in Nagasaki on orders of Shogun Iyemitsu.
The island was originally built for Portuguese merchants in 1634 but they were expelled five years later due to the shogun’s prohibition of the spread of Christianity in Japan. The Dutch were soon asked to move to the island and establish it as the trading post of the Dutch East India Company, doing business side by side with Chinese merchants but never allowed to go out into Nagasaki. From out of this port went the Japanese ceramics that eventually reached Boljoon in 1650-60.
In 1854, following the arrival of the U.S. commodore Matthew Perry, Dejima lost its primal position as Japan was forcefully opened, its trading ports soon pouring out Japanese silk, copper and gold to the rest of the world. The island and the buildings in it gradually faded.
In 1996, the City Council of Nagasaki embarked on a project to raise ¥1 billion to restore Dejima. There were already attempts to do this way back in the 1950s to no avail. This time, half of the amount, which was eventually raised four years later, was spent purchasing all the properties inside. Last Monday, I came to Dejima with the same team from USC that went to Arita and Imari (see last week’s column). Fifteen buildings have been restores so far, each of these replicating originals structures based on travel reports, documents and illustrations made in its 220 years of existence. There are plans to dig the canal that used to make Dejima into an island and continuing excavations have yielded plenty of artifacts that are prominently displayed in one of the buildings.
As usual, one marvels at the high precision and technology that go into museum and exhibition displays in Japan. The use of state of the art display mounts the attention to detail and the use of light and sounds awe us no end, whether at the Kyushu Ceramic Museum, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum or this latest set of restored buildings-cum-exhibition houses at Dejima. But it also gives me reason for pause. Can we do this for the thousands of pre-Spanish, late Spanish and early American artifacts (ceramics, bottles, iron nails, glasswares etc.) that we unearthed during the last phase of the SRP Subway Project?
We are only ten years away from the 500th anniversary of the Magellan expedition, and nothing much seems to be going on in Cebu as well as in Mactan, where Magellan’s life eventually ended. Well, there is, of course, the annual re-enactment of the battle. But other than that and the mythical Magellan’s Kiosk, there is nothing that seems to prepare us Cebuanos as well as visitors to Cebu about the impact of this voyage on the future of the island as much as of the Philippines.
As I wrote once in a previous column, there needs to be some serious thinking about how we present Cebu to the world at the onset of Spanish intrusion into the lives of us natives. This will require a lot of money to be able to establish museum exhibitions, reconstruct period structures, excavate the original enclave of Humabon, and show to the world how we were prior to and even during the Spanish invasion.
We can learn a lot from Dejima and how the Japanese have restored an important part of their existence, a time of total isolation that gave them so much space to construct and refashion their world with as little interference as possible, yet mindful of the role of outsiders in their progress. The people of Nagasaki have seen fit to bring back an artifact of their past, this man-made island called Dejima, to remind them of where they have been.
Well, at the same time, the fund-raising actually continues as I shelled out 500 yen (nearly P250) to go inside what was a once a fan-shaped island of 9,000 square meters. I really think we Cebuanos should seriously plan now for the 500th year when our culture was shaken to its very foundations, when our history was rewritten from the viewpoint of the conqueror. And Dejima may help inspire us to do this.