Dejima, Japan's window on the West

The shogunate built a small fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbour in 1634–1636 to confine Portuguese traders. After expelling them, it moved the Dutch East India Company there in 1641. For more than two centuries it was the only place Europeans could trade in Japan, and the route by which Western medicine, anatomy and astronomy, known as 'Dutch learning', reached Japanese scholars.