Dutch arithmetic, samurai and warships: teaching of Western mathematics in pre-Meiji Japan

This paper discusses the scarce occasions in which Japan came into contact with Western arithmetic and algebra before the Meiji restoration of 1868. It concentrates on the reception of Dutch works during the last decades of the Tokugawa shogunate and the motivations to study and translate these books. While some studies based on Japanese sources have already been published on this period, this paper draws from Dutch sources and in particular on witness accounts from Dutch officers at the Nagasaki naval school, responsible for the instruction of mathematics to selected samurai and rangakusha.