Kaji to kenka ha Edo no hana (Fires and fights are the highlights of Edo) is a famous phrase to illustrate that fires plagued the city of Edo (now known as Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Fires seem to have been considered not only terrible disasters, but also a symbol of a busy, active metropolis. The same is true in other early-modern Japanese cities, particularly those facing the Pacific Ocean or the East China Sea, such as Nagasaki.

The geographical setting of these two cities, among others, is one of four factors that contributed to many of the fires in Japan. The winter monsoon from the north or northwest caused by the Siberia anticyclone is steady and powerful from December to February, and the first summer monsoon from the south, called haru ichiban (the first wind of spring) in March or April is also quite strong. During these months, the combination of dry air, strong winds, and individual fires set to keep homes warm create fire hazard conditions. Even today, the season when most fires occur is winter.

As Edo lies in the center of the Kanto plain, there is nothing to prevent strong winds. Between 1601 and 1867, there were 1,798 fires in Edo, including 49 large fires, whereas Osaka experienced only six large fires and Kyoto nine. Although it is open to the sea on the south-west, Nagasaki is surrounded by mountains, so the winds blow from the north-east to the south-west. There were smaller fires in Nagasaki, which is a smaller city than Edo, but the number of incidents was still high. Nagasaki suffered from 232 fires during the period 1633–1868, including those that occurred in suburban areas.

I have often said, though mainly to captive audiences of students of Leiden University, that the mental map Japanese intellectuals had of their country counted three important hubs: Kyoto, Edo, and Nagasaki. Kyoto had the highest density of juku; it was the place where people studied. Edo was the place where everyone, and certainly the samurai, met; it was a clearing-house of all kinds of information. Nagasaki, finally, was the place that all self-respecting scholars and physicians would want to visit at least once, to get a whiff of the atmosphere of their “source country,” be it China or the Netherlands, and to acquire books.

This thesis, such as it is, breaks down into three questions that can, in principle, be answered. (1) Who travelled to Nagasaki? When? What did they do there? How long did they stay? What are the aggregate numbers? (2) Did an appreciable quantity of the imported Dutch and Chinese books remain in Nagasaki? (3) Did there exist an intellectual establishment in Nagasaki that catered to the needs of visiting students? In practice, it might well be a life's work to answer these questions. In this article, I will concentrate on one aspect of the second of these questions: the import of foreign books through Nagasaki. The context, however, should be kept in mind.

This idea has been with me ever since I read that Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) visited Nagasaki twice—once as a private person in the autumn of Keichō 7 (1602), when he stayed for over one month, and the second time in Keichō 12 (1607), immediately after he had been taken into the employ of Tokugawa Ieyasu's (1542–1616; shogun 1603–5).