For over two centuries of seclusion, Dejima was Japan's only window onto the West. The fan-shaped artificial island held the Dutch trading post of the VOC, and nearly all Western knowledge, objects, medicine and painting seeped into the country through this small piece of reclaimed ground. To stand on Dejima is to stand on the sill of that window.
Sixteen of the original buildings have been reconstructed — the residences of the trading-post staff, the warehouses, the ryotei — and the nineteenth-century streetscape stands again. This is not a ruin behind glass. It can be walked into, strolled in kimono, and used for an event on the ground where the exchange began, with guides who know the history well enough to let the place tell it.
Nothing substitutes for it: Dejima is the physical form of the narrative that Japan and the world first met here. Hold a reception on this ground and the theme explains itself, because the fan-shaped island underfoot is the metaphor. It carries any corporate theme built on connection, on crossing cultures, on facing outward, and a walk through the reconstructed streets in kimono gives guests an easy way into the history.