Big in Japan

Titia Bergsma was not the first Western woman to visit Japan. After the fall of Dutch Formosa in 1661 some Dutch women had briefly stayed in Japan, but nobody had any recollections of their presence. Titia Bergsma was the first woman who deliberately made the journey to live with her husband Jan Cock Blomhoff on Dejima in Nagasaki Bay in 1817. This went against the practice of sakoku, and she and her baby son were sent back to Batavia after three months. In the mean time, Japanese artists admired this wonder of nature, and portrayed the plain looking woman in various forms. In 2007 there were still some 150 products with her image sold in Japan.

The Japanese and the Dutch were both excellent bookkeepers of each other's actions. Still there is not much material about Titia Bergsma, who lived the life of a housewife and who died relatively young, as a footnote of history. Unfortunately the author seems to have romanticised part of the book, by stating explicit actions and emotions that must have been difficult to extract from later family memoirs. The boundary of fact and fiction is not always clear.

Titia Bergsma was the daughter of an affluent lawyer in Friesland. In 1804 she had met Blomhoff who was working out of Emden at the time. Earlier he had joined the stadtholder when he escaped to Britan. Blomhoff went to the Indies to seek his fortune and landed a job in Japan in 1809. During that time he fathered a child with the Japanese courtesan Itoagi, who was allowed to live with him as his maid. In 1813 Blomhoff was arrested in Batavia after negotiations with governor Raffles about British access to Japan. Raffles was angered about Blomhoff’s defence of Dutch exclusivity (Dejima was the only place on the globe where the Dutch tricolour flew in the days of French and British occupation), and sent him to London were he was briefly imprisoned before his return to Holland.

In the mean time Titia had moved with her parents to The Hague, where she and Blomhoff met and married within four months. After serving the military for over a year, they sailed to Batavia, together with their first-born child and a wet nurse. Here they lived with their servants in the suburb of Rijswijk. Blomhoff had obtained the lucrative position as head of Dejima and claimed that sakoku was no longer so strictly enforced. Blomhoff's case was accepted by the government in Batavia.

Titia Bergsma's arrival in Dejima was immediate news: nobody had ever seen a woman with her colour of hair, round eyes, empire dress with cleavage, straight way of walking and perfume. All day she was followed around by curious Japanese on the little island.

The next morning a request was made to the shogun's court in Edo for Titia to stay on the basis of Blomhoff's bad health and his tough negotiations for Dutch-Japanese relations with Raffles, while Titia was still followed around by curious Japanese. The beauty of Titia and her wet nurse and their dresses were included in reports, as was the egalitarian behaviour of Blomhoff and his wife: they used to walk hand in hand on the island, instead of Titia going two yards behind her husband. The artist Kawahara Keiga and Ishizaki Yushi came to paint Titia in various poses, usually with other members of her entourage. Their paintings were later copied and distributed across Japan.

The request for Titia to stay was however rejected within a few weeks. She, her son, the wet nurse and the Javanese maid had to leave Japan on the same ship. A petition by the retiring chief Hendrik Doeff was not even sent to the shogun. Neither was her secret last minute request. The governor of Nagasaki lost his job for even letting the women alight from the ship. Blomhoff reported in the Daily Register that he found the order inhumane.

Titia travelled first to Batavia and then back to Holland in a pregnant state. Titia reached Den Helder shortly before she was expected to give birth, and managed to get on a potato boat to her mother-in-law in Amsterdam. There it appeared Titia had only shown a phantom pregnancy. When her son met his grandparents he could only speak Malay to them.

Titia would never see her husband again. She would die in The Hague at age 36 in 1821. Blomhoff stayed in Japan until 1823. He made the court trip to Edo, saw Itoagi again, organised an operetta in Nagasaki and taught English to the translators. He would remarry upon his return to Holland. ( )