Hendrik Doeff

1777–1835

Hendrik Doeff was head of the Dutch Trading Post in the late Edo period. His surname was also written with the kanji characters 道冨. Originally from Amsterdam, in July 1799 he traveled to Nagasaki to work as secretary for the Dejima trading post and became head of the post in 1803 at the young age of 27. The Netherlands was under French control at the time owing to the Napoleonic Wars and was at war with Britain, and Doeff had a difficult time as trading post head with tasks such as having contact with his home country, cut off when Java was captured by British forces in 1811. And in previous events, such as the arrival of Russian envoy Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov in 1804 and an incident involving the HMS Phaeton in 1808, he aided Japanese diplomatic authorities when Japan was faced with such foreign crises, helping Japan to sidestep external pressures on it at the time. After the Netherlands became independent from France, Dutch ships arrived in Nagasaki in 1817, and he would eventually leave Japan in December of that year. He had spent 19 years in Japan, 14 of them as head of the trading post, and during this time he made three official visits to Edo.

During his long stay in Japan he developed a broad range of connections, from interpreters and scholars of Dutch learning to Shogunate officials and daimyo feudal lords. In particular, the interpreters Tokijuro Nakayama and Gonnosuke Yoshio assisted him in compiling a full-scale Dutch-Japanese dictionary based on François Halma’s Dutch-French dictionary. He is noted for the considerable role he played in cultural exchange as well, teaching French to interpreters on the side and so on. He died after returning to his home country in 1835 at the age of 57. He authored the work Recollections of Japan.

The dictionary Doeff worked on was completed in manuscript form in 1833 after he returned to the Netherlands, and it circulated under such titles as Do-yaku Haruma (Doeff’s Translation of Halma) and Nagasaki Haruma (The Nagasaki Halma). While distributed only in manuscript form, it was widely transcribed and made use of by Dutch language students as the highest quality Dutch-Japanese dictionary of the time, with 50,000 entries. Its use in Koan Ogata’s Tekitekisai School is detailed in Yukichi Fukuzawa’s autobiography. There is also an anecdote regarding two transcriptions of the dictionary that Kaishu Katsu made in the days of his youth: one to use for his own studies, the other to sell for living expenses.