Jagatarabumi [Letters from Jakarta]

£4,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Kawakami’s imagined letter from exile in Jakarta; one of only 15 ‘extra’ copies made in the same year as the first edition. Kawakami initially printed this book in an edition of 37 copies. The present copy is very slightly taller (by 5mm) and the binding is also subtly different – while the first printing has a printed title slip, the title on the second printing is written by hand. Internally, the book is printed from the same blocks and the hand colouring matches the first printing. Three decades later, in 1974, this title was republished in an edition of 500 copies by Toho Shobo. Jagatarabumi , or ‘Jakarta letters’, are a fascinating part of Edo-period history (1603-1868). During the period of the Tokugawa shogunate’s strict isolationist policy, there was tight control over which foreigners were allowed on Japanese soil. From the tenth year of Kan’ei (1636), mixed-race children and born to Japanese and Dutch, Portuguese or English (usually traders) were exiled to Macao, then from 1639 they were sent to Batavia, or present-day Indonesia. The exiled mixed-race children and their Japanese mothers were a small but important diaspora, and their letters home were known as Jagatarabumi . Very few of these letters survive in national collections in Japan today. This is the subject of the present book, which is an illustrated, imagined letter to Japan from Jakarta. In the seventeenth century, it was clear to the exiles that they would never return to Japan. Indeed, regulation only

• Year: 1941

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