Abstract: The early preoccupation with the shapes and partitioning of the European past in Japan was driven by a mixture of pedantic antiquarianism, amused ethnographic curiosity and a modicum of demand for geopolitical intelligence rather than by the considerably later arrival of the diplomatic gunboats of the western powers in mid-nineteenth century. As the Dutch philological expertise in the course of the eighteenth century gradually became another available tool—alongside the long-established Sinological erudition—for accessing information and generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the archipelago began to read and use not only medical or astronomical manuals of the Occidentals but also their histories.