Handwritten Japanese manuscript book set on Dutch Physics Treatises, compiled and written, the year Commodore Perry came to Japan. The volume has five treatises on physics from sources brought into Japan by Dutch ships through the isolated Dutch trading post of Dejima at Nagasaki, dating 1723, 1828, 1827, 1845, and so forth.

When formal trade relations were established in 1609 by requests from Englishman William Adams, the Dutch were granted extensive trading rights and set up a Dutch East India Company trading outpost at Hirado. They traded Asian goods such as spices, textiles, porcelain and silk.

When the Shimabara uprising of 1637 happened, in which Christian Japanese started a rebellion against the Tokugawa shogunate, it was crushed with the help of the Dutch. As a result, all Christian nations who gave aid to the rebels were expelled , leaving the Dutch the only commercial partner from the West. Among the expelled nations was Portugal who had a trading post in Nagasaki harbor on an artificial island called Dejima. In a move of the shogunate to take the Dutch trade from the Hirado clan, the entire Dutch trading post was moved to Dejima. The Dutch became the only Western country allowed to have a trading post in Japan during the two centuries that Japan remained closed to the outside world until Commodore Perry from the U.S. forced Japan to open up in 1853.