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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
But who then was to be the women they were to marry? (*) The official Dutch acceptance of Asian wives recognized the success of Portuguese policy for settling their colonies in Asia. The Portuguese, as the first Westerners in East Asia, had set up colonies in Goa in India and in Macao off the southern shores of China. In circulating regularly between Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, they had set up families to live out their lives in these foreign waters. But they too found it impossible to attract enough Portuguese women to their side. Thus, they had the Portuguese government send young marriageable girls from Lisbon to India. In the end, their numbers were too few, an average of no more than 10 a year, when the average annual number of males leaving Portugal for all of Asia rose from 1,700 between 1497 to 1570 to about 2,700 between 1570 to 1610, and down to 1,500 between 1611 and 1660. Although most of these men returned to Portugal, a more local solution for the problem of marriage for those who stayed was inevitable. Thus, from 1505 their viceroys gave their approval of intermarriage with local women. A century and more later, this kind of policy had born some fruit. By 1635, between 5,000 and 6,000 married Portuguese settlers are thought to have been living in Asia, 60% f them "black" or mixed blood. In Macao, the percentage was only a bit lower at 50%, with 850 whites and 850 of "black" or mixed blood.

Some of these Portuguese intermarriages in Macao consisted of Japanese wives or concubines. If anything, they proved too popular among rich Portuguese merchants for the pleasure of the Portuguese Jesuits and friars. Also, their number, from the late 1630s, was declining thanks to Japanese government policies. Not only had it refused to defend its nationals on Taiwan or become involved in its politics. But also it attempted to restrict foreign access to its women (as well as men). In June 1636, the Tokugawa government ordered that all Japanese living abroad could not return to Japan after a few years, and in September of that year all Japanese wives married to Portuguese were ordered to leave the country with their children. Then in June 1639, all Japanese mothers of children with Dutch and English fathers had to leave Japan for Batavia. Henceforth, Japanese women were not to live with Dutchmen or even associate with them. The Dutch allowed to stay on at the Nagasaki island of Dejima then had only the services of special Japanese prostitutes, whom the government permitted to visit them at fixed hours to, in the official terms, "prepare hot tea at night." So insistent were the Tokugawa on the exclusion of non-Japanese from their islands that in 1627, they rejected not only an offer of the island of Taiwan from certain aborigines anxious to avoid Dutch control, but also aborigine women presented to the shogunate as a sign of friendship (the shogun rejected them for being unattractive).

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