A Fake Embassy, the Lord of Taiwan and Tokugawa Japan.

In 1624, the Dutch East India Company established a colony on Taiwan. When Dutch authorities moved to tax and restrict Japanese traders, who had been sailing to the island for a number of years, they encountered immediate resistance spearheaded by Suetsugu Heizō, a Nagasaki official and merchant heavily invested in the Taiwan route. As part of his struggle against the Dutch, Heizō attempted to drag the Japanese state into the conflict by engineering a fake embassy formed of 16 aboriginal men recruited from a village in Taiwan and transported to the center of Tokugawa power in Edo. This paper explores the embassy and uses it to consider why powerful Asian states like Tokugawa Japan displayed so little interest in overseas expansion, creating a vacuum of power that European overseas enterprises rushed enthusiastically to fill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]