Please Hello: Don't Forget The Dutch
Pacific Overtures' Dutch Admiral 🇳🇱
As we reach our third Admiral in “Please Hello,” a pattern is emerging. America overwhelmed. Britain bureaucratized. Both powers arrived with an ideological wrapper: America’s was progress, Britain’s was civilization. Each offered gifts that were really arguments: kerosene and trains said we are modern, therefore we have the right; tea and diplomatic correspondence said we are sophisticated, therefore we should be in charge.
The Dutch Admiral arrives with chocolate.
The ideology here is, it’s fair to say, less clear. There’s seemingly no civilizing mission, no tentative arrangements pending proper diplomatic representation. There is a sales pitch, increasingly desperate, delivered by a man who in fact has more reason than any of the others to be in this room — and who has somehow, in the chaos of the opening, nearly been left out of it entirely. “Don’t forget the Dutch!” is the entrance of a country panicking.
That panic is our subject today. Because the Dutch Admiral, in his haste and his desperation and his shamelessness, accidentally says more about the structure of empire than any of his better-dressed colleagues.
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The Incumbent’s Entrance
Before we can hear what the Dutch Admiral says, we need to understand what he is.
Every other Admiral in “Please Hello” represents an arrival. America comes from nowhere, or rather from the confident presumption that nowhere is where Japan has been until now. Britain comes bearing institutional weight, the full administrative apparatus of a mature empire. Russia, France — all newcomers to Japanese waters, all presenting themselves as Japan’s introduction to the wider world.
The Dutch were already there.
Since 1641, the Dutch had been Japan’s only permitted Western trading partner, confined to Dejima — a fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, roughly the size of a city block, connected to the mainland by a single guarded bridge. No free movement. No Christian worship. Regular “tribute missions” to Edo, in which Dutch merchants bowed and presented gifts to a shogun who received them largely as curiosities. The Dutch accepted every humiliation because the trade was worth it.
This was the Dutch East India Company — the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) — which at its peak was the largest commercial enterprise the world had ever seen, with its own army, its own currency, its own capacity to wage war and sign treaties. By the time of “Please Hello,” the VOC had been dissolved for half a century, collapsed under debt and corruption. The Dutch state had inherited the Dejima concession, and with it the habit of profitable subordination — of accepting whatever restrictions Japan imposed in exchange for the right to keep trading.
For over two hundred years, the Dutch had operated within Japan’s rules. Their reward, in 1853, was to watch America arrive with warships and simply break those rules. Then to watch Britain, Russia, France, each in turn, extract concessions that rendered the old Dejima arrangement — the arrangement the Dutch had spent two centuries carefully maintaining — entirely obsolete. Hence:
Wait! Please hello!
Don’t forget the Dutch!
Like to keep in touch!
Thank you very much!
He speaks like a LinkedIn connection request sent into the void. We feel, from his very first words, the supplication of a man who knows the room has already moved on without him.
“Tell Them to Go”: The Aside and What It Reveals
The Dutch Admiral has been in the room for mere seconds when he drops the sales pitch entirely:
Tell them to go
Button up the lips
What do little Nips
Want with battleships?
This is unlike anything else in “Please Hello.” It is, first, an aside — the Dutch Admiral steps out of the number’s logic for a moment, perhaps addressing the audience, perhaps simply thinking aloud. Every other Admiral’s contempt is performed, encoded in their rhetoric: in the American Admiral’s broken English and his explosions-as-salutes, in the British Admiral’s polite insistence that you ignore the man-of-war anchored rather near the shore. The contempt is always mediated, always dressed up. The Dutch Admiral’s contempt is naked.
“Little Nips” is the only overtly racial slur in the entire number. That Sondheim gave it to the Dutch is a decision worth sitting with. The Dutch are the one power in the song with genuine long-term knowledge of Japan. They had spent two centuries on their little island, watching, trading, observing. Their contempt is born of familiarity, not ignorance.
There is something more damning in that than in any outsider’s slur. The Dutch knew Japan well enough to trade, well enough to accept extraordinary restrictions in order to maintain access, well enough that a Dutch physician based in Dejima in the 1820s — Philipp Franz von Siebold — produced some of the most detailed European scholarship on Japanese botany, geography, and culture of the entire century. And still: little Nips. Familiarity seems to have bred the particular contempt of a merchant who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The Catalogue: National Kitsch as Colonial Currency
Back to the pitch:
Wouldn’t you like to lease
A beautiful little piece
Of chocolate?Listen, that’s not to mention
Wonderful — pay attention! —
Windmills
Und tulips
Und wouldn’t you like a wooden shoe?
Set this alongside the other offerings thus far. America spoke of infrastructure, the physical systems through which a nation’s resources are extracted and monetized. Britain offered the permanent machinery of oversight, and tea (which Japan already had). Even when Britain’s gifts were condescending, they were condescending in an organised, long-term way.
The Dutch bring chocolate, windmills, tulips, and clogs.
What’s striking, casting a skeptical eye over the list, is how little of it is actually Dutch. Chocolate is Mesoamerican, brought to Europe by Spain in the sixteenth century and refined for mass consumption largely by the Swiss and Belgians. Tulips are Central Asian and Ottoman in origin — the famous Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s was a speculative bubble built on an imported flower. The Dutch are offering the world’s goods rebranded as their own, which is, in miniature, a fairly exact description of what the VOC actually did for two centuries: an empire of redistribution, extracting from one place and selling in another, rarely producing anything itself.
The wooden shoe is an inadvertent self-portrait. The clog is the one item on the list that is genuinely, distinctively Dutch — and it is a souvenir, a national stereotype, a branded image. It’s as if the Dutch Admiral, in his desperation, has reached the bottom of the bag and found a gift-shop trinket. There is something almost poignant in that: the great mercantile empire of the seventeenth century, reduced to hawking kitsch.
“Two Ports”: The Transaction Laid Bare
Good! We will need
Two ports
One of them not too rocky—
How about Nagasaki?
Two ports
One of them for the cocoa—
What do you call it? Yoko-
Hama! Ja!
Und Nagasaki! Ja!
The other Admirals at least maintain a fiction of strategic purpose. America wants coaling stations and commercial access. Britain wants treaty ports and a permanent diplomatic presence. Their greed is, we can concede, dressed in the language of geopolitical necessity.
The Dutch Admiral wants a port for the cocoa. This is the reductio ad absurdum of the number’s argument: sovereignty, in the hands of imperial commerce, becomes a question of supply chain management.
And then: “What do you call it? Yokohama!” Two centuries in the region, and he seems to struggle to remember the city’s name. Either it is a power move (I need not learn your geography to reorganize it) or it is simple indifference (this place only matters as a node in a network). Both readings are damning.
Nagasaki, of course, he knows. It is the one Japanese city the Dutch had actually inhabited. Demanding it back, we see the flicker of an incumbent reasserting old rights, slipping the name into the list as if it were still theirs by custom, which in some sense it was, and now is not.
A Clog Dance
Each Admiral in “Please Hello” is given a musical idiom as precisely chosen as his rhetorical one, as we have seen in recent premium subscriber essays. The American Admiral marches; the British Admiral patters in the tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy operas. The Dutch Admiral dances.
Sondheim writes a kind of clog dance. Everything in “Please Hello” prior to the Dutch arrival has been in duple time: the American Admiral was set principally in 6/8, the British Admiral principally in 2/4. We are now in triple time — in this case, a 3/4 that feels like 9/8. And it’s easy to hear the shift in character: less commanding, more needling, more dancelike. The Dutch Admiral, rather than breaking down the door or overwhelming us with bureaucracy, takes us by the hand and spins us into a transaction.
What the Dutch Reveal: Empire Without Costume
The Dutch Admiral is the only “Please Hello” diplomat who doesn’t bother with an ideological wrapper. Strip away the ideology — the civilizing mission, the procedural correctness, the legal immunity, the rhetoric of mutual flourishing — and what remains is a kind of structure: want something, leverage something, get a signature, want something else. In his very shamelessness, the Dutch Admiral draws the skeleton that every other Admiral clothes in more presentable fabric.
His later reappearances confirm this. When Russia secures extraterritoriality, the Dutch response is: “We want the same / What the Russkies claim! / Why you let them came? / Dirty rotten shame!” The grammar has collapsed entirely — worse even than the American Admiral’s deliberate pidgin, because this is pure tantrum rather than any kind of rhetorical strategy.
And what of the historical aftermath? The Netherlands never recovered its monopoly position. The VOC had died in debt and corruption before the century began. The Meiji era’s opening to the West would benefit primarily Britain, America, and eventually Germany. The incumbent lost to the newcomers, and the price of two centuries of profitable humiliation on a little island in Nagasaki harbor turned out, in the end, to be the habit of humiliation — useful when Japan set the terms, fatal once the terms changed.
Next month, the Russian Admiral will robe empire in legalism. We move from “Wouldn’t you like a wooden shoe?” to talk of extraterritoriality. In the meantime, whatever you do, don’t touch the coat.
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"The Dutch were already there."
Wow. I didn't know that. I thought Japan was totally cut off. This was a fine history lesson. It also explained the "little Nips" remark which has always confounded me. I can't wait to learn about the Russian Admiral.