Japan's first encounter with Europeans came in 1543 when Portuguese explorers landed on a small Japanese island. Decades of busy trade and cultural exchange followed, but within a hundred years the party was over. Japan's leaders adopted a seclusionist stance in the 1620s and '30s, and the country entered more than two hundred years of sakoku (literally, "closed country"). Travel to and from Japan was prohibited, but pictures and other information continued to trickle in, providing the Japanese with glimpses of the outside world. One such window into the world is this handheld scroll from 1649, showing people from forty different countries. Largely based on images the painter saw on an imported Dutch map, it is a striking reminder that Japan was never actually "closed."

The first thing a viewer sees when unrolling this scroll is not some European, or even a Japanese person. Instead, it's a Chinese couple. After all, the Japanese word for China means "Country at the Center"—of the world, that is.

The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean couples who appear first in the scroll each wear antiquated clothing. The Japanese couple, for example, wear courtly garb of the classical period, some eight hundred years before.

The inscription above this couple phonetically reads, "Biritaniya"—Britain, or Brittannia as it was sometimes called. The painter had never seen a British person, so instead he turned to illustrations from a Dutch map circulating through Japan at this time. Today, that map survives only in grainy photographs taken before World War II.

The painter did not just paint Europeans based on European images. He also adopted European painting techniques not used in Japan. With the exception of the East Asian figures, he depicted all the rest using modeling—the use of shading to suggest three-dimensionality.

No Japanese person in the 1640s had seen a Peruvian. Few, if any, had even heard of Peru. The painter of our handscroll turned to a picture on the Dutch map captioned "Chilenses et Peruiani" (Chile and Peru). He labeled the pair "Peruvians" but he left off the "Chileans."

Although it is clear that the painter used the illustrations from the Dutch map, he also made subtle changes. This Guinean man holding a bow, for example, seems to have lost his quiver (a holder for arrows) while his female partner now appears to be handing him an arrow.

This picture of a couple wearing clothes decorated with colorful feathers is captioned "America," a word and place the Japanese could not fathom. No such image exists on the Dutch map, so where did this image of native North Americans come from?

This trio of figures hails from Banda and Maluku, also known as the "Spice Islands," located between Indonesia and New Guinea. The Japanese were actually quite familiar with these southwest Pacific islands—throughout the early 1600s, Dutch traders employed Japanese mercenaries as they fought the rival British. They also exploited and massacred the native islanders.

A few fanciful beings also appear on the handscroll, like this pair of giants. Although the painter definitely did not get this image from any Dutch map, other Japanese works of the period also depict similarly fanciful people alongside real peoples of the world.