Jan Karel van den Broek
Jan Karel van den Broek was a Dutch doctor who lived in Nagasaki, Japan, during the Bakumatsu era. While in Japan, he briefly taught medicine, chemistry and photography.
He was born in Herwijnen, Netherlands, in 1814. He studied medicine in Rotterdam and began practicing in Arnhem in 1837. There he joined the Physical Society Tot nut en vergenoegen and gave many lectures and public demonstrations.
In 1852 he decided to leave for the Dutch East Indies. Before leaving, the University of Groningen gave him an honorary doctorate for his research on the human ear. In the Indies he worked briefly as a physician in Cirebon, Java, and then was sent to Dejima, the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki, arriving on August 1, 1853.
Japan had kept itself isolated for centuries, with trade allowed only at Nagasaki and mainly with the Dutch and the Chinese. After pressure from Western powers, Japan began to seek Dutch help for technology. The Nagasaki Naval Training Center opened in 1855 to teach Japanese people about steam warships, with Dutch advisors.
Van den Broek found that his skills were in demand in many technical areas. He helped with iron foundries, furnaces, shipbuilding, steam engines and their construction, and the making of chemicals like sulfuric acid. In December 1854 he started work on a Japanese-Dutch dictionary, which kept him busy for the rest of his life.
In 1856 he began teaching photography to Japanese students, including Furukawa Shumpei and Yoshio Keisai. In 1857 the Dutch commissioner, Janus Henricus Donker Curtius, sent him back to Batavia because he disliked Van den Broek. Van den Broek returned to the Netherlands in 1859 and worked to clear his name, succeeding that same year.
Jan Karel van den Broek died in Apeldoorn in 1865. His papers and the draft of his dictionary are kept at the Municipal Library of Arnhem, and his official correspondence is in the Netherlands National Archives in The Hague.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:33 (CET).