Background
Jan Joosten van Lodensteyn was born in 1560 and he was the son of a prominent family of Delft in the Netherlands.
Jan Joosten van Lodensteyn was born in 1560 and he was the son of a prominent family of Delft in the Netherlands.
In 1600 his ship was stranded on the shore of Bungo Province, present-day Oita Prefecture in Kyushu. In company with William Adams, another officer of the ship, he journeyed to Edo and was received in audience by Tokugawa Ieyasu. He won the confidence of the future shogun and was given a residence in Edo. The place name Yaesugashi, which continues in use in present-day Tokyo, is derived from his name.
Later, hoping to return to the Netherlands, he took ship to Batavia, but was unable to make satisfactory arrangements there and decided to go back to Japan. In the summer of 1623, however, his ship foundered on a reef of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea and he was drowned.
While in Japan he married a Japanese woman and had a son who also sent trading ships to Southeast Asia.