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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
     As a consequence of these decisions, the Japanese communities set up abroad in East Asia during the seventeenth century began to dry up. Only a third of the Japanese women known to have married in Batavia between 1618 and 1659 married Japanese men; the similar figure for Japanese men was one-seventh. Thus, the overwhelming majority of Japanese ended up with spouses of Dutch and other ancestry. In becoming the spouses of Dutchmen, Portuguese, and Chinese men, they gave birth to children not able to return to Japan and consequently saw the end of any self-conscious long-standing Japanese community outside of Japan by the end of the seventeenth century. In Macao, Japanese women entered the large harems of Portuguese merchants as female slaves (along with others from Malacca), but their offspring appears to have been few.

     Another theoretical alternative the Dutch would have considered was intermarriage with Taiwan aboriginals. Yet two problems obstructed this possibility. First, as already noted, conversion of the bride to Christianity was necessary for marriage. And second, Dutch men would have had to adapt to a form of uxorilocal marriage practiced commonly in a fair portion of the aboriginal villages the Dutch supposedly ruled over in the southwest of the island. Only at the age of 40 did the husband and wife form a joint household. Until he was that age, he would be engaged primarily in warfare and would live apart from his wife but for some night visits to her abode, and she would have to abort any conception in her womb. The women also were heavily engaged in all the extensive farming undertaken by the lowland aborigines, as the men, particularly the young mean, were too busy hunting and fighting to do what the Chinese and Dutch regarded as the work of a man. While such conditions may well have made the women happy to meet any advances from Dutchmen willing to free them from the soil, the Dutch preferred to "civilize" the male aborigines by giving them a plow to till the fertile soil and set up nuclear, patriarchal households which paid the Dutch taxes. This policy proved only partly successful, and in the end gave the Dutch few wives.

     Stuck with these highly limited options for settling their island colony along agreeable terms, the Dutch consequently accepted Chinese immigration and settlement as indispensable for their, the Dutch, rule of the island. They recognized the inevitability of overwhelming male domination among the Chinese migrants; the first Chinese women to arrive on the island reportedly came no earlier than 1646. But the Dutch saw in the Chinese a natural ally to conquer the country for them and pay taxes without much disorder. They rightly feared their control over the aborigines and the farmland, but saw the Chinese as a far better workforce.

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