This article focuses on the letter sent by Willem II, king of the Netherlands, to the Japanese shogun in August 1844, in order to reconsider if its aim was really "to recommend the opening of Japan", as conventionally thought. The author examines the decision-making process within the Dutch government before sending the king's letter and concludes that the main inducement for sending the letter was to gauge the issuance of a new decree in 1842. They wanted to find out if the Bakufu intended to abandon its seclusion policy totally or to make only minor concessions. The second purpose was to make a breakthrough in traditional Japanese-Dutch relations through the authorities in Nagasaki. The Dutch government knew that information could be lost or censored before it reached the highest levels in Edo, because of many intermediaries between the Dutch chief factor in Nagasaki and the Bakufu. At that time, the Netherland was facing a fiscal crisis resulting primarily from the loss of revenue that followed Belgian independence in 1830. Thus the Dutch government resigned itself to dispatch of a special envoy to Japan on fisial grounds, and ordered the chief factor instead to do the mission. The author argues that the main points of the king's letter were to confirm if Bakufu officials understood the changing circumstances in East Asia, and to discern whether the Bakufu intended to open Japan to international trade. On the second point, the Dutch government clearly received a very distinct answer to its inquiry, which showed the sending of letter was successful for the Dutch government. The author is doubtful that the Dutch government expected the letter to help expand trade with Japan. It is because she found no mention of their urge to open Japan in the Dutch governmental documents and because they did not provide any actual process for opening the country, for example a draft of a commercial treaty, in the king's letter itself. Apparently, the letter carried advice to open Japan, but it was only as an expedient to avoid armed conflict supposedly with Great Britain, which seemed to attempt commercial relationship with Japan next China after the Opium War. The Dutch government in fact did not want such new relations between Japan and Western powers, and valued the Bakufu's answer as a new permit for monopolizing the Japanese trade. Their attempt at direct communications beyond Nagasaki was not successful. The direct road to Edo was closed by the answer from the Bakufu councilors for the king's letter.

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The Shijing 詩経, the ancient Chinese classic dealing with poetry, contains many verses ranging from popular songs to those sung by aristocrats at their feasts, indicating at what stage poetry was in at the time, what functions it performed, as well as how the Shijing itself came into existence and was compiled. Consequently, the actual places where the verses of the Shijing were recited as related in the historical accounts of the Zuozhuan 左伝 and the Guoyu 国語 were mainly confined to gatherings in the broad sense, including banquets, alliance negotiations, swearing in rituals, conversation, joint military action, etc. It is also clear that very important venues for poetry were communal ceremonies of both a religious and formal nature. According to the fables about how poetry was composed, the place where the Shijing itself was compiled was one of these ceremonial venues, closely related to where the kings of the Western Zhou would bestow bronze implements on their retainers as a symbol of their superordinate-subordinate relationship. During the Western Zhou period, marked by an era of city-states, the Shijing was composed of the oral tradition of musicians, when the Zhou kings dominated the rest of China in both knowledge and technology. However, after the move east by the Zhou, its intellectual monopoly ended as the knowledge and technology was disseminated far and wide by those same musicians to the other states, which soon adopted the ruling methods of the Western Zhou kings. From the last decades of the Spring and Autumn Period, regional rule progressed to the extent of governments with literate bureaucrats carrying on administration by documentation, and due to the fact that the Shijing had been utilized by the Western Zhou Dynasty and the other lords of the Spring and Autumn period, it came to play a valuable political role in legitimizing kingship during the following era characterized by rebellion and usurpation. It was also a time when the Shijing itself went through a transition from oral to written from, as the knowledge of it demonstrated by the followers of Confucius spread throughout the strata of would-be bureaucrats. It was under such a situation, as indicated by the archeological evidence, that during the Warring States Period, the Shijing became one of the ancient classics and changed along with Chinese society as a whole in the transition from the Zhou and Spring and Autumn Period to the world of the Qin and Han Dynasties.

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