The Dutch East Indian Company was founded about 400 years ago, and in 1641 the artificial island of Dejima in the port of Nagasaki became its base. This island represented the only bridge between Japan, at that time in self-isolation, and the European countries, the Netherlands in particular. The physician and surgeon Philipp Franz von Siebold, born in Wurzburg in 1796, was appointed as factory doctor of the Dutch East Indian Company in Dejima and, later on, he made history as the scientific discoverer of Japan for the Western world. His grandfather Carl Caspar von Siebold was the first real...