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. 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.

A clearinghouse or customs office known as the Nagasaki kaisho (長崎会所) was established in 1698 and quickly became the chief institution regulating trade at the port. The office oversaw nearly all import and export activity, with particular focus on the trade in copper, silk, and marine products, regulating as well the sale of imported products to Nagasaki merchants, and effecting the transference of imported copper and silver to agents of the shogunal mints, and the sale of certain goods to agents of Tsushima han. The agency charged various fees, tariffs, and markups, earning revenues which contributed to maintaining its own operations and expanding shogunate coffers, though much of the money was also used to support the Nagasaki community. As Nagasaki was controlled directly by the shogunate, the merchants of Nagasaki were essentially direct subjects of the shogun, and thus entitled to a certain degree of protection and assurance of well-being from their lord. Thus, from 1663 onward, the Nagasaki bugyô (and, later, the Nagasaki kaisho) divided the profits from trade and tariffs among the districts of the city, after paying their own staffs. The amount paid out also derived from rents charged to Chinese merchants living in the Chinese compound, among other sources of official revenues. In years of particular difficulty for the merchant community, such as in 1713-1714, when epidemics killed an estimated 5,000 people in the city in the aftermath of a serious but temporary decline in trade in 1711, the bugyô-sho and kaisho did what they could to help out the merchant community even further. Of the roughly 161,000 ryô in profits the agency made in 1714, for example, roughly 70,000 was spent or paid out within Nagasaki, and roughly 76,000 was sent to the shogunate's Osaka treasuries; this in comparison to the closely similar figure, 171,000 ryô, spent by the lord of Kaga han in 1747 on domain expenditures.

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.