Nihon Ōdai Ichiran

[2] The material selected for inclusion in the narrative reflects the perspective of its original Japanese author and his samurai patron, the tairō Sakai Tadakatsu, who was daimyō of the Obama Domain of Wakasa Province.

Dutch Orientalist and scholar Isaac Titsingh brought the seven volumes of Nihon Ōdai Ichiran with him when he returned to Europe in 1797 after twenty years in the Far East.

The manuscript languished after Titsingh's death in 1812; but the project was revived when the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland sponsored printing and publication in Paris with distribution to be handled from London.

Masatsuna's comments on this text were lost in a shipwreck as the edited manuscript was being forwarded from Japan to India in 1785 where Titsingh had become head of the Dutch East Indies Company trade operations at Hoogly in West Bengal.

In Keian 5, 5th month (1652), Nihon Ōdai Ichiran was first published in Kyoto under the patronage of one of the three most powerful men in the Tokugawa bakufu, the tairō Sakai Tadakatsu.

Post-Meiji scholars who have cited Nihon Ōdai Ichiran as a useful source of information include, for example, Richard Ponsonby-Fane in Kyoto: the Old Capital of Japan, 794-1869.

Titsingh's correspondence with William Marsden, a philologist colleague in the Royal Society in London, provides some insight into the translator's personal appreciation of the task at hand.

[11] The fund had sponsored Klaproth's work and was the principal underwriter of the publication costs Japanologist John Whitney Hall, in his Harvard-Yenching monograph on Tanuma Okitsugu assessed the utility of this translation and its context: Isaac Titsingh himself considered the Nihon odai ichiran fairly dry.