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Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan. By H. Byron Earhart. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. xx, 238 pp. $39.95 (cloth, ISBN 9781611170009); $39.95 (e-book, ISBN 9781611171112).

Japan, the VOC representatives elected to humble themselves as “vassals” (Jp. fudai, D. vassalen) (pp. 99–100) of the Tokugawa. Their leader, the Holland Captain, became lord of the tiny domain of Deshima. As vassals, the Dutch participated in the alternate attendance system by annually traveling to Edo for an audience with the shogun; fulfilled military obligations by participating in the Shimabara campaign; submitted annual intelligence reports; and even—like other daimyo—invented histories of service to Tokugawa Ieyasu. In chapters 4 and 5, Clulow adds a legal-historical theme to the chorus of scholarship revising the early modern European military revolution thesis. He explains how the Tokugawa nullified the VOC advantage in naval warfare by denying it legal opportunities to engage in violence. Clulow explores how, over the early decades of their rule, the Tokugawa gradually, if contingently, projected sovereignty over the seas through anti-piracy legislation. Their laws variously treated vermilion-seal trading licenses, shipping lanes, and Chinese ships as vehicles for constraining behavior and imposing perceptions of the sea as a ruled space. The VOC had hoped to extend Dutch privateering campaigns against the Iberian powers to Asia and also found itself embroiled in conflict with various Chinese forces. Iberian and Chinese seafarers hamstrung the VOC by suing the Dutch in Japanese courts. The Tokugawa bakufu and its Nagasaki magistrates rejected Dutch claims and treated their privateering as illicit, as “piratical” (Jp. bahan) (pp. 165–67). The final two chapters explain how the VOC retracted claims to sovereignty in relations with Japan, first over colonial territory, and then over its own personnel. Faced with Tokugawa instructions to destroy its citadel on Taiwan, Fort Zeelandia, for violating a ship bearing a vermilion-seal license, the VOC broke one of its cardinal principles of sovereignty—extraterritoriality—and surrendered a high-ranking official to Japanese justice. Clulow concludes with a comparative survey of VOC encounters with Asian polities. From that vantage point, VOC subordination to the Tokugawa appears both distinctive and indicative of the degree to which Europeans voluntarily assimilated to East Asian political and cultural norms in the early modern period. Clulow’s book should be of interest to many. His analyses of VOC “socialization” in Japan integrate and make important contributions to the scholarship on early modern cross-cultural encounters as well as European and Japanese political, diplomatic, and military histories.