Shiimoto Ine was born on 31 May 1827[lower-alpha 1] in the city of Nagasaki.[2] The surname Shiimoto came from a Japanese rendering[4] of the surname of her German father, the physician Philipp Franz von Siebold, who was living on Dejima, an artificial island off Nagasaki to where foreign trade was restricted during the more than two centuries of Japan's near-total self-seclusion from the world. There he played a role in introducing Western medical techniques to Japan. Ine's mother was Kusumoto Taki,[lower-alpha 2] a courtesan [ja][lower-alpha 3] sent at 16 from the Nagasaki pleasure district Maruyama in 1823 to be Siebold's concubine.[lower-alpha 4][7]