The story of early diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and Japan cannot be told without mentioning the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (Netherlands Trading Society, or NHM). On the initiative of King Willem I, the company was founded in 1824 to stimulate Dutch trade.
Initially, the aim was to encourage all Dutch trade. After 1827, however, the company focused exclusively on the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). This focus would open the road to Japan, as the trading post at Dejima was managed by the Dutch East Indies government at Batavia (present-day Jakarta).
In 1859, NHM sent Albertus Johannes Bauduin (1829–1890) as representative to Nagasaki to effectively take over management of Dutch trade in Japan from the Batavia government. Over the following years, NHM also opened offices in Yokohama (1864), Kobe and Osaka (1868), Tokyo (1869), and Niigata (1869).
NHM was initially quite successful. It inherited both a monopoly on Dutch trade with Japan, and age-old connections with the Tokugawa government and the daimyo (hereditary local lords). For two centuries, the Netherlands had been the only European nation allowed to trade in Japan. This had built a lot of trust and familiarity.
However, the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and the resulting abolishment of the daimyo system, drastically upset NHM’s commercial position in Japan. The company saw its traditional client base essentially disappear overnight. It had to completely rebuild its commercial network.
It is not the company’s trade in Japan however, that necessitates a spotlight on this company. What makes NHM important to a study about the history of Dutch diplomatic locations in Japan is that each local NHM representative became a consul for the Netherlands.
The consulates in Nagasaki, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, and briefly Niigata and Tokyo, were eventually all located at the NHM offices in these cities.
In the 19th century, it was common for traders and merchants to be appointed as consuls. But it was quite unusual for a company to monopolize the consular appointments in a country.
This happened partly because in its early years, NHM more closely resembled a public institution than the private enterprise it technically was. The company’s very objective was to play a national role in reviving the Dutch economy.
Possibly of even more importance was that King Willem’s direct involvement in NHM’s establishment led to an unusually close relationship between the Dutch government in the Hague and NHM’s Managing Board in Amsterdam.
Considering the level of trust required to carry out consular activities, it is no surprise that the government wished to keep such appointments within NHM as much as possible. From the government’s viewpoint, it also made the consular reports about economic and political developments more reliable.
These merchant-consuls had no diplomatic status, so their activities were officially limited to the civil administration of Dutch nationals. Nonetheless, the position offered great prestige, and provided a level of access to the Japanese government that otherwise might have been far more difficult to obtain.
This could, and did, cause tension with competing trading houses. Dutch traders like Cornelis Theodoor Assendelft de Coningh, who wrote the book A Pioneer in Yokohama, and representatives of the trading house Carst & Lels repeatedly wrote anonymous letters to newspapers in the Dutch Indies and the Netherlands, alleging collusion between NHM and Dutch Consul, later Consul-General and Minister, De Graeff van Polsbroek.
The confrontations became especially heated in 1865 when a scathingly critical article about such alleged collusion was published in the Dutch weekly for trade and industry, De Nederlandsche Industriëel. It led to discussions in the Dutch parliament, and a personal letter of concern to De Graeff van Polsbroek from the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs.1 De Graeff van Polsbroek clarified the situation and the affair faded away.
The tensions remained, though. On March 30, 1868, the Rotterdam daily Handelsblad wrote that “people in Japan do not seem to be particularly satisfied with the way in which De Graeff van Polsbroek provides for the needs of trade there by appointing provisional consuls, mostly ‘employees’ of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij.”
The paper quoted a private letter from Hyogo (Kobe): “We have now received consuls in Hiogo and Osacca [sic], all employees of NHM. In Osacca, a young man of 21 or 22 years, to whom we must entrust our interests. It seems that the treaties with Japan have only been concluded for the benefit of NHM.”2
These confrontations ended in 1880. NHM had been unable to adapt to the changes brought by the change in Japan’s government, and the company pulled out of the country. It took until 1919 before NHM returned. This time as a banking office in Kobe, because the company had transitioned from a trading company into a banking conglomerate.
The word handel (trade) disappeared from its name when NHM merged with Twentsche Bank in 1964 and became Algemene Bank Nederland (ABN). In 1991, the ABN merged with AMRO Bank to form the Dutch bank ABN AMRO, which is still active today.
Willem Kortekaas was employed by ABN from 1965 to 1990 and was posted in Japan in 1969–1975 and 1983–1990. He is researching the history of NHM in Japan.
Next: What is a Consul General?
Notes
1 Nederlands Archief. 2.05.01 Inventaris van het archief van het Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, 1813-1870: Benoeming en ontslag van diplomatieke en consulaire ambtenaren: 3052 Japan, 1863 – 1870.
2 Nieuwe Rotterdamsche courant: staats-, handels-, nieuws- en advertentieblad. Rotterdam, March 30, 1868, pp. 2.
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Reference for Citations
Kortekaas, Willem (). Trading Places, From Dejima to Tokyo. Retrieved on November 9, 2025 (GMT) from https://www.dejima-tokyo.com/articles/73/trading-places
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