Nagasaki

• Japanese: 長崎 (Nagasaki)

Nagasaki is a port city in Kyushu, the capital of Nagasaki prefecture. It is perhaps most famous today for the atomic bombing of the city on August 9, 1945, but was in the Edo period one of the most major ports in the archipelago for international trade, home to communities of Chinese and Dutch merchants.

The city was established as a trading post c. 1570-1572, and quickly became a major port for Portuguese and Spanish trade. Converted Christian warlord Ômura Sumitada ceded the port town to the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1580, including judicial authority within the town. They quickly established a church and seminario (a Jesuit school for Japanese youths), which included within it a painting academy. The Christian community in Nagasaki enjoyed some considerable early successes, but soon came under persecution; in a particularly (in)famous incident in 1597, 26 Christians in the city, a combination of Europeans and Japanese converts, were executed at the orders of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The Tokugawa shogunate issued its first bans on Christianity in 1606, shutting down Jesuit operations in Nagasaki and expelling them from the country in 1614. European ships were restricted to Nagasaki and the nearby port of Hirado in 1616. The Spanish were then expelled fully from the country in 1624, and Japanese were forbidden from returning from overseas in 1630. For the remainder of the Edo period, foreign trade at Nagasaki was restricted almost entirely to the Dutch and Chinese; on the rare occasion that Russian or certain other ships attempted to enter the country, they were directed to Nagasaki as well, though they were rarely actually allowed to land people or enter into trade.

In the course of a series of these maritime prohibitions (kaikin) put into in the 1630s, the Spanish and Portuguese were banned from the country, and the Dutch were restricted to the tiny artificial island of Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor. Chinese merchants, originally free to move about the city (and the country), and to intermingle with the Japanese, were restricted after 1689 to the Chinese neighborhood of Nagasaki, known as the Tôjin yashiki ("Chinese mansions"). Pigs were raised in a certain area just outside of the city, serving chiefly these two foreign communities. Nagasaki was the only place in Edo period Japan where meat was commonly eaten, with the exceptions in other parts of the archipelago of the consumption of fowl, game animals such as bear, boar, and deer, consumption of meat for medical purposes, and of course the eating of fish.

Along with Osaka, Kyoto, and a handful of other cities, Nagasaki was controlled directly by the shogunate, and was not included within any daimyô domain; defense of the port was the responsibility, however, of the daimyô of all the domains on Kyushu, as part of their corvée obligations to the shogun. This was handled primarily by Fukuoka and Saga han, each of which oversaw the defenses for one year at a time, handing over to one another in the fourth month each year. Those sent to Nagasaki included not only warriors, but also roughly 95 to 165 villagers - chiefly fishermen and other boatmen - impressed into service by way of corvée obligations, to transport warriors in their boats, and/or to serve otherwise in Nagasaki. While middle- and high-ranking Fukuoka retainers served in Nagasaki for around 100 days at a time, lower-ranking figures such as ashigaru typically served for the entire year. Incidents such as the arrival of Russian and British ships in the early years of the 1800s spurred dramatic expansion of defensive precautions, and thus expansion of the number of men dispatched from Fukuoka and Saga to aid in the defense. On two occasions in 1800, more than 10% of the adult male population of Fukuoka domain is said to have been on guard duty in Nagasaki, and in 1808, when the HMS Phaeton sailed into Nagasaki harbor, Fukuoka sent 8,000 men to aid in the defense; they arrived, however, too late, after the Phaeton had already departed.

A samurai official known as the Nagasaki bugyô (Nagasaki Magistrate) was the chief shogunal authority in the city, overseeing both matters within the city, and matters of trade at the port. For several decades in the 17th century, the bugyô was assisted by the Nagasaki tandai shoku, who was responsible for the defense of the port. Following that, a clearinghouse or customs office known as the Nagasaki kaisho was established in 1698 and quickly became the chief institution regulating trade at the port, remaining so up until the fall of the shogunate in 1867. Despite numerous dramatic shifts in shogunate policies and in the markets for various goods, the overall total monetary value of the trade done annually at Nagasaki remained steady for nearly this entire period, from 1711 to 1840.

Many Kyushu domains, including Tsushima and Satsuma, maintained domain offices in the city. Agents of Tsushima were stationed in the port city in part in order to purchase from Chinese and Dutch merchants certain Southeast Asian luxury commodities such as buffalo horn, alum, and sappanwood, which Tsushima could then give to the Korean Court as tribute goods; by authorization of the shogunate, these Tsushima officials were permitted to buy the highest quality such goods available at a highly reduced rate. Korean castaways found/rescued anywhere in Japan were sent to the Tsushima han office in Nagasaki, after which they could be repatriated to the Wakan ("Japan House") in Pusan. All other foreign castaways similarly passed through Nagasaki, with the exception of those from Ryûkyû, who were sent to Kagoshima to be repatriated. Kagoshima also handled Japanese castaways who had been found/rescued in the Ryukyus.

After the port was opened to Western merchant activity in the Bakumatsu period, for a brief time Western merchants attempted to insert themselves into the existing trade networks in marine products, etc. and in Chinese goods. However, around the same time, the Taiping Rebellion caused the number of Chinese ships calling at the port to plummet, and the traditional patterns of trade between the Chinese residents in Nagasaki and the Nagasaki kaisho collapsed. The character of activity at the port transformed rapidly, as direct trade with Westerners came to dominate; Chinese merchants in the port city turned to insert themselves into this new pattern, abandoning the old one. The port also quickly became the site of a lively trade in modern steamships and sailing vessels, with as many as 106 ships being sold at Nagasaki between 1860 and 1867. Satsuma, among others, began collecting goods from various domains to sell at Nagasaki, as the port was thrown open to freer involvement of outside parties.

References

• Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement, Harvard University Press (2009).