A Dutch-Japanese phrase book, compiled in 1770 for a trade legation from Holland -- the only Westerners permitted to reside on Japanese soil by the xenophobic shoguns -- had a mere 80 phrases. Its brevity suggests a paring down to the absolute essentials of speech needed to get by with the locals. Yet eight of the phrases -- an eye-catching 10% of the total -- pertained to hiring the services of female companions. These included a scripted exchange that would not be out of place in one of the more free- wheeling modern guidebooks for Western travelers to Thailand, say, or the Philippines: "Do you like that girl? / Yes, I like her a great deal. / Would you like me to make appropriate arrangements? / Yes, please do." One can almost picture bewhiskered Dutch lips smacking in a most un-burgher-like anticipation.

The Dutch legation was confined to a small island off the Nagasaki harbor. But the Japanese authorities -- sensitive to the basic needs even of hairy, barbarian Christian men -- allowed courtesans from the Maruyama pleasure quarter of Nagasaki to visit the Dutchmen. Occasionally the Dutch were taken on excursions to Maruyama itself, always with an official Japanese escort. "Imagine," Richard Bernstein writes, "a delegation of Japanese traders in France being escorted by Louis XIV's police to an elegant Parisian brothel." This, he observes, would have been inconceivable, even if there had been Japanese traders in Europe at the time, because Eastern sexuality "was a world apart from the sexual culture of Europe."...