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History
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Portuguese traders first sailed into Nagasaki, then a small fishing village of just 1500 inhabitants, in 1570. They returned the following year to establish a
trading
post and
Jesuit mission
at the invitation of the local
daimyo
, who was already a Catholic convert. The merchants built up a flourishing business exchanging Chinese silks for copper and silver, while the Jesuit fathers financed their missionary activities by taking a turn on the profits. The Portuguese were soon the most powerful force in Nagasaki, despite competition from Chinese traders and, later, Spanish Franciscan and Dominican fathers. For a brief period, Christianity was all the rage, but in the late sixteenth century Toyotomi Hideyoshi, fearing the missionaries would be followed by military intervention, started to move against the Church. Though the persecutions came in fits and starts, one of the more dramatic events occurred in Nagasaki in 1597 when Hideyoshi ordered the crucifixion of 26 Franciscans.
After 1616 the new shogun, Tokugawa Hidetada, gradually took control of all dealings with foreigners and by the late 1630s only Chinese and Portuguese merchants continued to trade out of Nagasaki. The latter were initially confined to a tiny island enclave called Dejima , but in 1639 even they were expelled following a Christian-led rebellion in nearby Shimabara . Their place on Dejima was filled by Dutch merchants who had endeared themselves to the shogun by sending a warship against the rebels. For the next two hundred years this tiny Dutch group together with a slightly larger Chinese community provided Japan's only link with the outside world. Eventually, the restrictions began to ease, especially after the early seventeenth century when technical books were allowed into Nagasaki, making the city once again Japan's main conduit for Western learning . Nevertheless, it wasn't until 1858 that five ports, including Nagasaki, opened for general trade. America, Britain and other nations established diplomatic missions as Nagasaki's foreign community mushroomed and its economy boomed. New inventions flooded in: the printing press, brick-making and modern shipbuilding techniques all made their Japanese debut in Nagasaki.
In the early twentieth century the city's industrial development was spearheaded by the giant
Mitsubishi dockyards
. Nagasaki became an important naval base with huge munitions factories, an obvious target for America's second
atomic bomb
in 1945. Even so, it was only poor visibility at Kokura, near Fukuoka, that forced the bomber, critically short of fuel, south to Nagasaki. The weather was bad there too, but as "Bock's Car" flew down the Urakami-gawa at 11am on August 9 a crack in the cloud revealed a sports stadium just north of the factories and shipyards. A few moments later "Fat Boy" exploded. It's estimated that 73,000 people died in the first seconds, rising to 140,000 by 1950, while 75,000 were injured and nearly forty percent of the city's houses destroyed in the blast and its raging fires. Horrific though these figures are, they would have been higher if the valley walls hadn't contained the blast and a spur of hills shielded southern Nagasaki from the worst. An American naval officer visiting the city a few weeks later described his awe at the "deadness, the absolute essence of death in the sense of finality without resurrection. It's everywhere and nothing has escaped its touch." But the city, at least, did rise again to take its place with Hiroshima as a centre for anti-nuclear protest and an ardent campaign for world peace. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Japan,
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