Nanban trade
During the Nanban trade Period (1543–1650 CE) when Japan was opened to Europeans, the Jesuit Mission Press published two groundbreaking dictionaries. The 1598 monolingual "Rakuyōshū" (, "Collection of Fallen Leaves") gave Sino-Japanese and native Japanese readings of characters, and introduced the small raised circle ("handakuten" ) to indicate the "p" sound (compare "ha" and "pa" ). The 1603–1604 bilingual Japanese-Portuguese "Nippo Jisho" or "Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam" dictionary is still cited as an authority for early Japanese pronunciation. The year 1604 was at the beginning of the Edo Period and also, as Nakao (1998:37) points out, the date of the first monolingual English dictionary, the Table Alphabeticall.