This Tanuma (uncle of the Shōgun) was, according to Titsingh’s account, a young man of uncommon merit and liberal ideas, and the anti-frog-in-a-well party flattered themselves that, when he should succeed his father, he would, as they expressed it, “widen the road.” After his appointment as extraordinary councillor, he and his father incurred, as Titsingh states, the hatred of the grandees of the court, by introducing various innovations, which the “Frogs in a well” censured as detrimental to the empire. It was to this feeling that his assassination was ascribed, a crime which put an end to the hopes which had begun to be entertained of seeing Japan opened to foreigners, and of its inhabitants being allowed to visit other countries. The appetite for foreign knowledge which Thunberg had noticed was also observed by Titsingh. “During my residence in Japan,” so he writes in the above-quoted Introduction, “several persons of quality, at Yedo, Miyako, and Ōsaka, applied themselves assiduously to the acquisition of the Dutch language and the reading of our books. The prince of Satsuma, father-in-law of the present Shōgun, used our alphabet to express in his letters what he wished a third person not to understand. The surprising progress made by the prince of Tamba, by Katsuragawa Hozan, physician to the Shōgun, and Nakagawa Junan, physician to the prince of Wakasa,[73] and several others, enabled them to express themselves more clearly than many Portuguese born and bred among us at Batavia. Considering the short period of our residence [he means, apparently, the stay of the Dutch embassy] at Yedo, such proficiency cannot but excite astonishment and admiration. The privilege of corresponding with the Japanese, above mentioned, and of sending them back their answers corrected, without the letters being opened by the government, allowed through the special favor of the worthy governor, Tango-no-Kami, facilitated to them the learning of Dutch.”