Nagasaki

• 1. Introduction

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  Nagasaki sits at the head of the finest natural harbor on the island of Kyushu, a city whose geography made it a crossroads for centuries of contact between Japan and the wider world. In 1543, a Portuguese ship blown off course landed on Tanegashima and set in motion a chain of events that would eventually transform this quiet harbor village into one of the most consequential ports in all of Asia. How did a Jesuit missionary colony become a banned religion's last refuge? How did a secondary bombing target become ground zero for one of history's most devastating single events? And how does a city shaped by so much destruction still stand as a working port, a center of industry, and a living record of its own layered past? Those questions run through every street corner of Nagasaki.

• 2. Portuguese Roots

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  When António Mota and Francisco Zeimoto stepped ashore at Tanegashima in 1543, they carried Portuguese matchlock guns called harquebuses. The local lord, Tanegashima Tokitaka, purchased two of these firearms and had his blacksmiths replicate them, starting the development of what became known as the Tanegashima matchlock in Japan. Those guns rippled outward into the wars of the Sengoku period, contributing to Japan's eventual unification.

  The Portuguese did not just bring weapons. They served as trade intermediaries between Japan and mainland China at a moment when those two neighbors had severed their own commercial ties, largely due to conflicts involving wokou piracy in the South China Sea. Regular Portuguese trade ships created a market, but Kyushu lacked a proper harbor for foreign vessels. The demand for one was urgent.

  Spanish Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier arrived at Kagoshima in 1549, and his followers converted a number of daimyo after he departed. The most consequential convert was Omura Sumitada. In 1569, Omura granted a permit for a new port, and the harbor at Nagasaki was established in 1571 under the supervision of Jesuit missionary Gaspar Vilela and Portuguese Captain-Major Tristao Vaz de Veiga. The little village grew rapidly into a diverse port city.

  The goods flowing through Nagasaki reshaped Japanese daily life. Tobacco, bread, and textiles arrived from Portugal. A Portuguese sponge cake called castella entered Japanese cuisine. Tempura traces its name to the Portuguese word tempero, meaning seasoning, and to the tempora quadragesima, the forty days of Lent during which meat was forbidden. By 1637, the value of Portuguese exports from Nagasaki had reached as many as 3,000,000 cruzados.

• 3. City of Martyrs

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  By 1580, the situation in Nagasaki had taken a remarkable turn. Omura Sumitada and Jesuit leader Alessandro Valignano, worried that the city might fall to a non-Catholic daimyo during the instability of the Sengoku period, transferred administrative and military control to the Society of Jesus. For a brief period, Nagasaki was a Jesuit colony, functioning as a refuge for Christians fleeing persecution elsewhere in Japan.

  That era ended abruptly in 1587, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign to unify Japan reached Kyushu. Concerned by the depth of Christian influence in the region, Hideyoshi ordered all missionaries expelled and placed the city under his direct control. The expulsion order went largely unenforced, and most of Nagasaki's population continued to practice Catholicism openly.

  The turning point came in 1596, when the Spanish ship San Felipe wrecked off Shikoku's coast. Hideyoshi learned from its pilot that Spanish Franciscans were supposedly the vanguard of an Iberian invasion. On the 5th of February 1597, he ordered the crucifixion of twenty-six Catholics in Nagasaki. They became known as the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan and were later venerated by several Popes.

  When Tokugawa Ieyasu took power in 1603, Catholicism was still tolerated, in part because many Catholic daimyo had been critical allies at the Battle of Sekigahara. Once Osaka Castle fell and the Toyotomi line was extinguished, however, the Tokugawa grip was secure. By 1614, Catholicism was officially banned. A brutal campaign of persecution followed, with thousands killed, tortured, or forced to renounce their faith across Kyushu. Many Christians were executed by public crucifixion and burning at the stake in Nagasaki itself.

  The last open armed expression of that faith came with the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637. The rebels of Shimabara Domain, which had been a Christian han for decades, adopted Portuguese motifs and Christian icons. The word Shimabara subsequently became linked in Tokugawa society with the idea of religious disloyalty. The rebellion convinced policymakers that foreign influence was more trouble than it was worth, leading to a national isolation policy. The Portuguese were expelled entirely from Japan, removed from Dejima, the artificial island in Nagasaki harbour that had served as their trading post. The Dutch were then moved onto Dejima in their place.

• 4. Window on the World

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  The Great Fire of Nagasaki in 1663 destroyed much of the city, including the Mazu shrine at Kofuku Temple, which had been a center of worship for the Chinese sailors and merchants who called at the port. Yet commerce continued through Dejima, where the Dutch maintained their carefully monitored presence.

  In 1720, the ban on Dutch books was lifted, and hundreds of scholars flooded into Nagasaki to study European science and art. The city became a major center of what was called rangaku, or Dutch learning. Historians once held that Nagasaki was Japan's only window on the world during the Tokugawa era of national seclusion; the current scholarly consensus is more nuanced, acknowledging that Japan also interacted with the Ryukyu Kingdom, Korea, and Russia through other domains. Still, Nagasaki was depicted in contemporary art and literature as a cosmopolitan port teeming with exotic goods from the West.

  The Chinese presence in the city was substantial. It is believed that as much as one-third of Nagasaki's population during this period may have been Chinese. Chinese traders were confined to a walled compound called Tojin yashiki, located near Dejima, and their activities were closely monitored by the Nagasaki bugyo, the city's chief administrator appointed by the shogunate.

  In 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Phaeton entered Nagasaki Harbor in search of Dutch trading vessels. The local magistrate was unable to resist the crew's demands for food, fuel, and water, and he later committed seppuku out of shame. Laws passed in the wake of that incident strengthened coastal defenses, threatened death to intruding foreigners, and prompted the training of English and Russian translators. The incident stands as evidence that even in seclusion, Nagasaki remained entangled in the conflicts of the wider world.

• 5. Meiji Industry

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  Nagasaki became a treaty port in 1859 as Japan's Meiji Restoration reopened the country to foreign trade and diplomacy. Modernization began in earnest in 1868, and on the 1st of April 1889 the city was officially proclaimed a city. With Christianity legalized, the Kakure Kirishitan, or Hidden Christians who had practiced in secret for generations, came out of hiding, and Nagasaki resumed its historical role as a center of Roman Catholicism in Japan.

  The Meiji period transformed Nagasaki's economy. Shipbuilding became the dominant industry, with the dockyards under control of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries serving as a prime contractor for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Nagasaki harbour functioned as an anchorage under the control of the nearby Sasebo Naval District.

  By the time of the Second World War, the city's industrial base had grown to include the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, the Akunoura Engine Works, the Mitsubishi Arms Plant, the Mitsubishi Electric Shipyards, and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works, among other plants. Together, these facilities employed about 90% of the city's labor force and accounted for 90% of the city's industry. That concentration of war production made Nagasaki a significant Allied bombing target well before August 1945.

• 6. Fat Man and Urakami Valley

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  In the twelve months before the nuclear attack, Nagasaki had experienced five small-scale air raids by an aggregate of 136 American planes, dropping a total of 270 tons of high explosives, 53 tons of incendiaries, and 20 tons of fragmentation bombs. The heaviest of these, on the 1st of August 1945, hit the shipyards, struck the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, and put six bombs on the Nagasaki Medical School and Hospital. The raids prompted the evacuation of schoolchildren to rural areas, reducing the city's population somewhat before the atomic attack.

  On the 9th of August 1945, Nagasaki's population stood at an estimated 263,000, composed of 240,000 Japanese residents, 10,000 Korean residents, 2,500 conscripted Korean workers, 9,000 Japanese soldiers, 600 conscripted Chinese workers, and 400 Allied prisoners of war. That morning, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar, commanded by Major Charles Sweeney, lifted off from Tinian's North Field before dawn carrying a plutonium bomb code-named Fat Man. Kokura was the primary target.

  When Bockscar reached Kokura at 9:44 a.m., the city was obscured by clouds and smoke. The nearby city of Yahata had been firebombed the previous day, and workers at the Yahata steel plant had deliberately set fire to coal tar containers to produce target-obscuring black smoke. After multiple failed attempts at a visual bombing run, Bockscar left for its secondary target at 10:30 a.m. Nagasaki was also covered by clouds when the plane arrived at 10:50 a.m., and the crew, desperately short of fuel, resorted to radar targeting. At the last moment, a break in the clouds revealed a racetrack, and the bomb was aimed at the Urakami Valley, between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works to the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works to the north. Fat Man exploded 47 seconds after release, at 11:02 a.m., at an altitude of approximately 1,800 feet.

  Less than a second after detonation, the north of the city was destroyed. The dead numbered more than 35,000, including 6,200 of the 7,500 employees at the Mitsubishi Munitions plant and 2,000 Koreans among the 24,000 other civilians killed. Among the dead were 150 Japanese soldiers. Fat Man was more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier, but Nagasaki's uneven terrain limited the blast's reach. It was the second and, to date, the last use of a nuclear weapon in armed conflict, and also the second combat detonation of a plutonium device, following the Trinity test in central New Mexico on the 16th of July 1945.

• 7. Rebuilding and Memory

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  The first simple emergency dwellings were not provided until 1946, reflecting the slow pace of reconstruction after the war. The formal framework for rebuilding was established when the Nagasaki International Culture City Reconstruction Law was passed in May 1949. Planners directed the city's economy away from war industries and toward foreign trade, shipbuilding, and fishing.

  Nagasaki chose to preserve fragments of the destruction alongside new construction. A one-legged torii at Sanno Shrine, left standing after the blast, was kept in place as a memorial. An arch near ground zero was preserved. The Atomic Bomb Museum was built to record what happened, situated next to the Peace Park. The Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims was also raised as a place of remembrance.

  On the 4th of January 2005, the towns of Iojima, Koyagi, Nomozaki, Sanwa, Sotome, and Takashima were officially merged into Nagasaki, with the town of Kinkai following the next year. The city today supports a rich shipbuilding industry and remains primarily a port city, anchored to the same harbor that Portuguese sailors first navigated more than four centuries ago. Among those born in Nagasaki was novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, whose family emigrated to England when he was a child, carrying with them a memory of this city's particular history.