Nagasaki

Nagasaki, officially Nagasaki City, is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan.
Founded by the Portuguese, the port of Nagasaki became the sole port used for trade with the Portuguese and Dutch during the 16th through 19th centuries. The Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region have been recognized and included in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. Part of Nagasaki was home to a major Imperial Japanese Navy base during the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War. Near the end of World War II, the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Nagasaki the second city in the world to experience a nuclear attack. The city was later rebuilt.
, Nagasaki has an estimated population of 392,281, and a population density of 966 people per km². The total area is.

History

Nagasaki as a Jesuit port of call

The first recorded contact between Portuguese explorers and Japan occurred in 1543, when a Portuguese ship, possibly a Chinese junk carrying Portuguese sailors, was blown off course and landed on Tanegashima, an island south of Kyūshū. This event marked the beginning of direct contact between Japan and Europe.
Two Portuguese traders, António Mota and Francisco Zeimoto, were among the crew members. They introduced the Japanese to firearms, specifically the Portuguese matchlock guns known as harquebuses. The local lord, Tanegashima Tokitaka, purchased two of these firearms and had local blacksmiths replicate them, leading to the development of the Tanegashima matchlock in Japan.
Fernão Mendes Pinto, a Portuguese adventurer and writer, claimed in his memoirs, Peregrinação, that he was part of the first landing party in 1543. However, his account is considered unreliable, and historians generally agree that he was not among the first Europeans to reach Japan.
The introduction of firearms had a significant impact on Japanese warfare, contributing to the unification of Japan during the Sengoku period. The Portuguese also introduced other goods and ideas, including Christianity, which further influenced Japanese society.
Today, the arrival of the Portuguese in 1543 is commemorated in Tanegashima with the annual Teppō Matsuri, celebrating the island's historical connection to the introduction of firearms in Japan.
Soon after, Portuguese ships started sailing to Japan as regular trade freighters, thus increasing the contact and trade relations between Japan and the rest of the world, and particularly with mainland China, with whom Japan had previously severed its commercial and political ties, mainly due to a number of incidents involving wokou piracy in the South China Sea, with the Portuguese now serving as intermediaries between the two East Asian neighbors.
Despite the mutual advantages derived from these trading contacts, which would soon be acknowledged by all parties involved, the lack of a proper seaport in Kyūshū for the purpose of harboring foreign ships posed a major problem for both merchants and the Kyushu daimyōs who expected to collect great advantages from the trade with the Portuguese.
In the meantime, Spanish Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier arrived in Kagoshima, South Kyūshū, in 1549. After a somewhat fruitful two-year sojourn in Japan, he left for China in 1552 but died soon afterwards. His followers who remained behind converted a number of daimyōs. The most notable among them was Ōmura Sumitada. In 1569, Ōmura granted a permit for the establishment of a port with the purpose of harboring Portuguese ships in Nagasaki, which was set up in 1571, under the supervision of the Jesuit missionary Gaspar Vilela and Portuguese Captain-Major Tristão Vaz de Veiga, with Ōmura's personal assistance.
The little harbor village quickly grew into a diverse port city, and Portuguese products imported through Nagasaki were assimilated into popular Japanese culture. Tempura derived from a popular Portuguese recipe originally known as peixinhos da horta, and takes its name from the Portuguese word, 'tempero,' seasoning, and refers to the tempora quadragesima, forty days of Lent during which eating meat was forbidden, another example of the enduring effects of this cultural exchange. The Portuguese also brought with them many goods from other Asian countries, such as China. The value of Portuguese exports from Nagasaki during the 16th century were estimated to ascend to over 1,000,000 cruzados, reaching as many as 3,000,000 in 1637.
Due to the instability during the Sengoku period, Sumitada and Jesuit leader Alessandro Valignano conceived a plan to pass administrative control over to the Society of Jesus rather than see the Catholic city taken over by a non-Catholic daimyō. Thus, for a brief period after 1580, the city of Nagasaki was a Jesuit colony, under their administrative and military control. It became a refuge for Christians escaping maltreatment in other regions of Japan. In 1587, however, Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign to unify the country arrived in Kyūshū. Concerned with the large Christian influence in Kyūshū, Hideyoshi ordered the expulsion of all missionaries, and placed the city under his direct control. However, the expulsion order went largely unenforced, and the fact remained that most of Nagasaki's population remained openly practicing Catholic.
In 1596, the Spanish ship San Felipe was wrecked off the coast of Shikoku, and Hideyoshi learned from its pilot that the Spanish Franciscans were the vanguard of an Iberian invasion of Japan. In response, Hideyoshi ordered the crucifixions of twenty-six Catholics in Nagasaki on February 5 of the next year. Portuguese traders were not ostracized, however, and so the city continued to thrive.
In 1602, Augustinian missionaries also arrived in Japan, and when Tokugawa Ieyasu took power in 1603, Catholicism was still tolerated. Many Catholic daimyōs had been critical allies at the Battle of Sekigahara, and the Tokugawa position was not strong enough to move against them. Once Osaka Castle had been taken and Toyotomi Hideyoshi's offspring killed, though, the Tokugawa dominance was assured. In addition, the Dutch and English presence allowed trade without religious strings attached. Thus, in 1614, Catholicism was officially banned and all missionaries ordered to leave. Most Catholic daimyo apostatized, and forced their subjects to do so, although a few would not renounce the religion and left the country for Macau, Luzon and Japantowns in Southeast Asia. A brutal campaign of persecution followed, with thousands of converts across Kyūshū and other parts of Japan killed, tortured, or forced to renounce their religion. Many Japanese and foreign Christians were executed by public crucifixion and burning at the stake in Nagasaki. They became known as the Martyrs of Japan and were later venerated by several Popes.
Catholicism's last gasp as an open religion and the last major military action in Japan until the Meiji Restoration was the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637. While there is no evidence that Europeans directly incited the rebellion, Shimabara Domain had been a Christian han for several decades, and the rebels adopted many Portuguese motifs and Christian icons. Consequently, in Tokugawa society the word "Shimabara" solidified the connection between Christianity and disloyalty. The Shimabara Rebellion also convinced many policy-makers that foreign influences were more trouble than they were worth, leading to the national isolation policy. The Portuguese were expelled from the archipelago altogether. They had previously been living on a specially constructed artificial island in Nagasaki harbour that served as a trading post, called Dejima. The Dutch were then moved from their base at Hirado onto the artificial island.

Seclusion era

The Great Fire of Nagasaki destroyed much of the city in 1663, including the Mazu shrine at the Kofuku Temple patronized by the Chinese sailors and merchants visiting the port.
In 1720, the ban on Dutch books was lifted, causing hundreds of scholars to flood into Nagasaki to study European science and art. Consequently, Nagasaki became a major center of what was called rangaku, or "Dutch learning". During the Edo period, the Tokugawa shogunate governed the city, appointing a hatamoto, the Nagasaki bugyō, as its chief administrator. During this period, Nagasaki was designated a "shogunal city". The number of such cities rose from three to eleven under the Tokugawa administration.
Consensus among historians was once that Nagasaki was Japan's only window on the world during its time as a closed country in the Tokugawa era. However, nowadays, it is generally accepted that this was not the case, since Japan interacted and traded with the Ryūkyū Kingdom, Korea and Russia through Satsuma, Tsushima and Matsumae respectively. Nevertheless, Nagasaki was depicted in contemporary art and literature as a cosmopolitan port brimming with exotic curiosities from the Western world.
In 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Phaeton entered Nagasaki Harbor in search of Dutch trading ships. The local magistrate was unable to resist the crew’s demand for food, fuel, and water, later committing seppuku as a result. Laws were passed in the wake of this incident strengthening coastal defenses, threatening death to intruding foreigners, and prompting the training of English and Russian translators.
The Tōjinyashiki or Chinese Factory in Nagasaki was also an important conduit for Chinese goods and information for the Japanese market. Various Chinese merchants and artists sailed between the Chinese mainland and Nagasaki. Some actually combined the roles of merchant and artist such as 18th century Yi Hai. It is believed that as much as one-third of the population of Nagasaki at this time may have been Chinese. The Chinese traders at Nagasaki were confined to a walled compound which was located in the same vicinity as Dejima island, and the activities of the Chinese, though less strictly controlled than the Dutch, were closely monitored by the Nagasaki bugyō.