It has been 12 years since I had occasion to review on this page the first volume of the Deshima Diaries Marginalia. Now the second volume has appeared.
The marginalia consist of abstracting annotations to the actual diaries maintained at the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki during the Edo Period. The Dutch originals, covering hundreds of volumes, are held by the General State Archives in The Hague.
Since these extremely informative and valuable manuscripts are rather inaccessible, the Japan-Netherlands Institute has undertaken to edit the annotations and translate them into English. The hiatus of 12 years between the publication of the first volume and second is an indication of how much work is involved in this project. But it was worth the effort.
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