Isabel Tanaka-Van Daalen

Isabel Tanaka-Van Daalen is a joint researcher at the Center for the Study of Visual Sources of the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo. Her research concerns the Dutch-Japanese historical relations in the Edo period, in particular the Japanese interpreters working for the Dutch on Deshima. She is also preparing a PhD thesis in History at Leiden University on these interpreters, focusing on their non-official activities and their (private) dealings with the Dutch residents in Japan. During her more than 25-year-long career at the Japan–Netherlands Institute in Tokyo, she was involved, among other things, in the compilation of the Kodansha’s Dutch-Japanese Dictionary and the English marginalia publications, holding the contents of the diaries written by the heads of the VOC trading post on Deshima. She has also published several genealogies of Japanese interpreter families. She has published a number of articles and chapters including “Communicating with the Japanese under Sakoku: Dutch Letters of Complaint and Attempts to Learn Japanese”, in Large and Broad: the Dutch impact on early Modern Asia: essays in honor of Leonard Blussé, ed. Nagazumi Yoko, Toyo Bunko Research Library 13 (Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2010), pp. 100–29.