Nagasaki

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Nagasaki

The history of Nagasaki, Japan, has been inexorably tied—both positively and negatively—to European expansion and Western colonialism. The founding of the port of Nagasaki was directly related to the initial wave of European expansion into Asia. Portuguese explorers rounded the tip of Africa and sailed into Asia just after the turn of the sixteenth century in search of trade goods and opportunities to proselytize. By 1511 they had established fortified stations at Mozambique, India, and Malacca (in present-day Malaysia), and in 1555 they finally built a base at Macao in southeastern China.

By this time, Portuguese traders had already reached Japan. In 1543 Portuguese sailors had drifted ashore at a small island south of Kyushu. Six years later, Jesuit missionaries went to Japan in an effort to convert as many Japanese as possible to Catholicism. The Jesuits exhibited early proselytizing successes in Japan. Part of this success was attributable to the promise of the annual Portuguese China Ship coming from Macao to ports in Japan, where the local daimyo supported Christianity. At the time, the Ming government of China had banned foreign trade, thus allowing the Portuguese an opportunity to control the silk-for-silver trade between China and Japan as third-party intermediaries.

In 1571 a permanent home for the Portuguese China Ship was established at Nagasaki, a heretofore small fishing village with a shallow harbor that had recently been dredged by the Jesuits. A port town was constructed at Nagasaki to handle the needs of foreign trade and to serve as a haven for harassed Christians in Japan.

Christian churches were built on the former sites of Buddhist temples and by the end of the first decade, the local Christian daimyo, unable to protect Nagasaki against attacks by non-Christian daimyo and desirous of the benefits of Western trade, agreed to donate the port town to the Jesuits. The Jesuits administered the town until 1587, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), the military ruler of Japan, issued an edict calling for the expulsion of Christian missionaries and the destruction of all Christian churches in Nagasaki. Some churches were torn down, but the expulsion order was not enforced. After bribing the necessary officials, the missionaries were able to continue their work, albeit with more discretion. Hideyoshi, while condemning the missionaries, appreciated their role as interpreters and intermediaries in Western trade, and did not want to jeopardize this profitable venture.

Nagasaki was made a public territory, with Japanese officials coming to the town from time to time, but, in actuality, foreign missionaries and local Christian merchants continued to handle day-to-day administrative concerns and foreign trade. Spanish Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries from Manila soon joined the Jesuits in Nagasaki and proselytizing efforts expanded. They were followed in 1609 and 1613 by Dutch and English traders, who established themselves on the island of Hirado, just north of Nagasaki.

For a short time, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British traded side by side, but Japanese government crackdowns on Christianity and poor business decisions by the English resulted in the departure of all but the Dutch from Japan by 1639. In 1641 the Dutch were forced by Japanese officials to move from Hirado to the manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. At the same time, Japanese leaders imposed a maritime prohibition policy (sakoku) on its own people, prohibiting them from leaving the country and restricting foreign trade to a few designated merchants.

Later in the seventeenth century, both the Portuguese and English tried to reestablish trade relations with Japan but to no avail. The policy remained in effect and all foreigners who strayed into Japanese waters were taken to Nagasaki, where they were imprisoned until they could be deported. Christianity was strictly prohibited upon punishment of death; therefore, all remaining Japanese Christians went underground with their beliefs.

By the early nineteenth century, the Russians, English, and Americans were all knocking on Japan's door, but Japanese officials refused to alter the country's maritime trade policy until forced to do so by Commodore Matthew Perry (1794–1858) and his armed American fleet in 1853 and 1854. Perry's forced opening of Japan, along with the British defeat of China in the Opium War a decade earlier, represented the beginning of the second phase of Western imperialism in Asia.

A commercial treaty followed in 1858, which opened three Japanese ports, including Nagasaki, to foreign trade and residence in July 1859. Landfill was brought in from neighboring islands to fill in the eastern side of the harbor, and a foreign settlement was constructed. The Russians, who later used Nagasaki as a winter port for its Asiatic Fleet, lived in a separate area across the harbor. Soon the settlements were filed with missionaries, sailors, merchants, and government officials. The latter were needed because extraterritoriality—the right to try westerners according to Western law—was a provision of the new treaties. Also included in the treaties were a "most-favored nation" clause and the right of Western nations to determine tariff duties on most Japanese goods. Nagasaki remained a designated treaty port until the so-called Unequal Treaties were revised in 1899.

Even though Nagasaki became a free port in 1899, the number of westerners in the city continued to grow until the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). It was also at this time that Nagasaki became renowned as the setting of Giacomo Puccini's (1858–1924) famous opera Madama Butterfly (1904), which came to represent to some the West's colonial attitude toward East Asia.

From 1905, however, Nagasaki's fortunes began to decline, and by the end of World War I most European and American merchants had left and fewer warships called at the port. This left only a limited number of missionaries and government officials to cope with the rising influence of militarism, as Japan itself became an ever-stronger imperial force in the struggle for East Asia and the Pacific.

Nagasaki was spared from much of the conventional bombing that most Japanese cities suffered during World War II, but on August 9, 1945, a 10,000-pound (4,536-kilogram) plutonium bomb was detonated over the city, killing more than seventy thousand people. A week later, the war was over, and by September American occupation officials had arrived to take control of Nagasaki. American officials stayed until 1952, when Japan regained its independence. Since this time, Nagasaki has depended on Mitsubishi Shipyards and historical tourism to support its economy.

see also Empire, Japanese; Japan, Colonized.