Japan goes Dutch
Murray Sayle: Japan’s economic troubles, 5 April 2001
“... eagerly sought by the standoffish Japanese, and with their silk earnings, the spices that made Holland the corner grocery of Europe. Between 1630 and 1680 the VOC was clearing three million guilders’ worth of precious metals a year from Asia alone. This financed more voyages, and the beginnings of what might have been the first temperate-climate world ... ”