A meeting of Japan, China, and the West, by Shiba Kōkan.

Hendrik Caspar Romberg (bapt. 11 October 1744 - 15 April 1793)[1] was a Dutch bookkeeper, merchant-trader and VOC Opperhoofd in Japan.

Life

Hendrik Caspar Romberg was the son of Zacharias Romberg, a bookprinter/seller on Spui in Amsterdam.[2] Hendrik was baptized not in the opposite Lutheran church, but at home.[3] In 1763 he traveled to Batavia in East Asia with the Dutch East Indies Company (or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC in Dutch). Ten years later he was appointed in Deshima as bookkeeper. Romberg spent more than ten years in Japan. It seems he was good-looking had an affair with a Japanese prostitute.[4]

He was the Opperhoofd, head of VOC trading post, during four discrete periods:

  • 27 October 1782 – August 1783[5]
  • November 84 – 21 November 1785
  • 21 November 1786 – 30 November 1787
  • 1 August 1789 – 13 November 1790

Romberg traveled five times to Edo.[6] In an unknown year he attended a theater performance in Osaka.[7] In April 1787 he presented the lord of Satsuma a sweet wine from Jurançon.[8] In 1788 he met with Shiba Kōkan, interested in Western painting, and technique.[9] Romberg's account of the Sangoku-maru is a scant record of the brief attempt by the Tokugawa shogunate to create a sea-going vessel in the 1780s. The ship sank; and the tentative project was abandoned when the political climate in Edo shifted.[10]

In the off-years, he spent time in Batavia, which was at that time the VOC headquarters in the East Indies.[11] The registers also listed him as chief warehouseman and paymaster.[12]

Notes

  1. ↑ Information on Hendrik Casper Romberg from the VOC records.
  2. ↑ Kloeckhof, Balthasar (1736). "De aanlokkelyke prys van Paulus geestelyke ridderschap, voorgedragen in een lyk-reede, uit 2 Timoth. 4. Vs. 7,8. Ter nagedachtenisse van ... Caspar Heesper".
  3. ↑ Amsterdam City Archives
  4. ↑ "De Gids. Jaargang 141 · DBNL".
  5. ↑ "Japan in al zijn facetten".
  6. ↑ French, Calvin L. (1974). Shiba Kōkan: artist, innovator, and pioneer in the westernization of Japan, p. 65.
  7. ↑ http://www.librairie-du-cardinal.com/userfiles/LDC_Cat_AS.pdf
  8. ↑ Luxury in the Low Countries: Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish ... geredigeerd door Rengenier C. Rittersma
  9. ↑ http://magazine.sieboldhuis.org/custom/PDF/TNJR_v1_2_2010_van_Gulik_Verschuivende_Perspectieven.pdf
  10. ↑ Screech, Timon. (2006). Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779-1822, pp. 48-49., p. 48, at Google Books
  11. ↑ Historiographical Institute. (1988). Historical documents relating to Japan in foreign countries, Vol. I, pp. 52, 160.
  12. ↑ Lembaga Kebudajaan Indonesia. (1827). Verhandelingen, Vol. 6, p. 28., p. 28, at Google Books

References

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