CJS Lecture Series | The Massacre and the Conspiracy: Locating the Japanese Diaspora in Seventeenth Century Southeast Asia

In 1621, Japanese soldiers participated in a massive Dutch East India Company invasion of the Banda islands in Southeast Asia. Pressed into service as executioners, they were involved in the opening act of a violent campaign to pacify a key territory in the Dutch empire. Just two years later, Japanese soldiers found themselves facing the executioner’s blade as they were accused of plotting against the Company on the nearby island of Ambon. These two episodes in 1621 and 1623 encapsulate the Dutch East India Company’s shifting relationship with the Japanese recruits that it transported to Southeast Asia to wage war on its behalf. This talk will explore the Company’s short-lived experiment with recruiting Japanese military labor and how this can be located within the wider history of the Japanese diaspora in seventeenth century Southeast Asia. In the last part of the talk, I will turn to examine the surprising resilience of Japanese communities both in the Dutch overseas empire and more generally across the region.

Adam Clulow is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2014), which won multiple awards including the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, and Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019). He is creator of The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, an online interactive trial engine that received the New South Wales Premiers History Award in 2017, and Virtual Angkor with Tom Chandler, which received the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the 2021 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from the Medieval Academy of America.

Please register for this zoom event here: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_B9t1CWWgRaqLTYF_ssg3ag

This colloquium series is made possible by the generous support of the U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.