The Founding of Nagasaki, 1571

The Archdiocese of Nagasaki's history of its Church, written by Father Diego Yūki, director of the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum, tells how the city began with a request. When Father Cosme de Torres spoke with Ōmura Sumitada, he asked for a piece of land that he could share out among believers who had been persecuted elsewhere. The land was a long, narrow cape covered with pine and scrub, running out into the quiet water of Nagasaki Bay.¹

That is the thread of this page. Nagasaki is remembered as a port of the Portuguese ships and as a Jesuit town, and it was both. But it began as a place for Christians to live.

The Jesuits had been looking for a safe harbour for years. The Portuguese ships went to Hirado, where the lord, Matsura Takanobu, profited from the trade but made trouble for the missionaries.²In 1562 Brother Luís de Almeida and a Christian from the capital, Gonoe Bartolomeu, had the bay of Yokoseura in Ōmura's lands sounded, and Sumitada opened it to the ships; he was baptised there in 1563, taking the name Bartolomeu, and became the first Christian lord in Japan.²³Within months Yokoseura was destroyed in a rising against him.²A new port was opened at Fukuda, on the open coast close to Nagasaki, but in 1565 ships from Hirado attacked the Portuguese carrack there, and the Portuguese only beat them off with great difficulty.²³Torres began to look for a harbour that could be better defended.²

The architectural historian Amaro Bebio Vieira, whose University of Tokyo thesis studies the Christian buildings of the port, notes one lesson the missionaries drew. Around Fukuda the Jesuits and Sumitada worked to win over the lords of the neighbouring lands, so that the port would not again be overthrown by a rebellion as Yokoseura had been.²

There was already a Nagasaki. It was the small castle town of Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, a vassal of Sumitada and already a Christian, baptised Bernardo.²⁴In 1567, after Sumitada visited Torres at Kuchinotsu, Almeida went to Nagasaki and received from Jinzaemon a piece of land and a small temple.¹Almeida wrote on 20 October 1568 that all the leading people of the place had become Christians, about two hundred, and that three hundred more were ready.²

In 1568 Torres sent Gaspar Vilela from Fukuda to Nagasaki.¹Vilela, writing later from Goa, described what happened. He lodged in the temple Jinzaemon had given him, but held back from turning it into a church until there were Christians to fill it. He gathered the people of the place, who heard him the first time "with very bad grace"; trusting in God's mercy he gathered them a second time, and after many talks and questions they came to the truth. He baptised them by turns, now two hundred, now four hundred, until in the first year there were fifteen hundred; and the lord of a neighbouring village called him and was baptised with many of his people.²(Vieira notes that the whole population was about 1,500, and reads the baptisms of 1569 as about 400 to 600; the figures are Disputed.)²

In 1569 Vilela pulled down the temple and built from it a new church, "very fresh, though poor," in honour of All Saints.²The Archdiocese gives the day it was completed as 1 November 1569, the feast of All Saints, and calls it, in the words of the time, "small and beautiful."¹Vilela wrote that at the Mass of Holy Thursday he washed the feet of twelve poor people in the middle of the church while a Brother read the Gospel of St John to them in Japanese.²At Easter, Fróis records, the whole Christian people kept the feast with a procession and Mass and then dances.²Vilela also wrote that, in gratitude for the church, the people pulled down the temples of the old gods round about; the Church did not hide such things, and this page reports it as he wrote it.²

Todos os Santos was the first church of Nagasaki.²⁵In the spring of 1570 Torres himself moved there, old and ill, and Sumitada came to visit him.¹

In July 1570 the new superior of the mission, Francisco Cabral, held a meeting of the missionaries at Shiki in Amakusa, and there, the Archdiocese says, the question of the new town and port of Nagasaki was discussed and decided.¹Cabral went on to Nagasaki, met Sumitada, and travelled with him to Ōmura, where that summer he baptised the rest of Sumitada's family; the two agreed to found a new settlement for nine hundred Christians, nearly half of them already baptised.²In October, about the time that Torres died a holy death at Shiki, Father Melchior de Figueiredo came into the bay from Fukuda with the Portuguese captain Manoel Travassos and fixed the site of the new port.¹⁶

Nagasaki City's own chronology dates the agreement to open the port to Genki 1 (1570).⁷Kōdansha's biographical dictionary says it was Jinzaemon who, following the agreement between Sumitada and the Portuguese, opened the port and laid out the six streets.⁴

In the spring of 1571, the Archdiocese writes, Sumitada's senior retainer Tomonaga Tsushima no kami opened the first six streets of Nagasaki on the cape.¹The city's information board at the site names them: Hirado-machi, Ōmura-machi, Shimabara-machi, Yokoseura-machi, Hokaura-machi and Bunchi-machi.⁸They stood near the end of the long cape, at a place called Morisaki.⁸At the very tip, where the Nagasaki Prefectural Office later stood, Figueiredo built a small church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.¹Vieira, piecing together the scanty evidence, says it was very simple, with a tatami floor, and an altar on which stood a tabernacle holding a painted retable of Our Lady.²

The city chronology records 1571 as the year the first Portuguese ship entered and the building of the town began.⁷Vieira, too, places the building of the port in the first half of 1571 and the arrival of the great ship in the summer.²The art historian Alexandra Curvelo, following Boxer and Diego Pacheco, names the ship: the Great Ship of the Captain-Major Tristão Vaz da Veiga, which in 1571 sailed to Nagasaki for the first time.¹⁰

The church of Our Lady, the Archdiocese writes, grew step by step until it became the centre of the Church in Japan.¹

The new town was not left in peace. The lord of Fukahori, at the mouth of the bay, was a brother of the lord of Isahaya, Sumitada's enemy; Fróis calls him a "great pirate."²In 1573 troops from Isahaya, Fukahori and Arima attacked Sumitada, Nagasaki among his lands, coming in boats on the rising tide to fire on the palisades.²Once, when the town was too weak to defend itself, Fróis tells how the Christians fled into the hills, taking only what they could carry, and with them the tabernacle and its picture of Our Lady, which they bore on their backs in procession with the priest into the thickest woods, "with great anguish and tears."²They came back. Vieira quotes a later account of how, finding the church stripped and abandoned, they cleaned and renewed it.²

People kept coming. By 1580 the new port town had about four hundred houses and two churches, Todos os Santos and the church of the Assumption of Our Lady.¹Other streets were added by merchants who came from elsewhere: Kōzen-machi, Bungo-machi, Sakura-machi.⁸In 1580 Sumitada gave the six streets and Mogi to the Society of Jesus; the city's board says that Nagasaki became a great centre of Christianity, "like a little Rome of Japan."⁸Our page on the 1580 gift tells that story.⁶The lay Christians organised themselves too: in 1583 a layman, Justino Casaria, founded the confraternity of the Misericórdia, with its own church in Kōzen-machi, and two chapels drew the townspeople on pilgrimage, Santa Maria at the foot of Mount Tateyama and Santa Clara beside the Urakami River, loved by sailors.¹

Jinzaemon, the Christian lord of the village, did not stay to the end. Kōdansha's dictionary says that when Nagasaki village became shogunal land in 1605 he fled to Kurume and later moved to Togitsu in Hizen; he died on the twelfth day of the twelfth month of Genna 7, which the National Astronomical Observatory's calendar database gives as 23 January 1622, aged about seventy-four.⁴¹³

The church of Our Lady at the tip of the cape was enlarged, rebuilt and finally destroyed with the ban; the magistrate's western office was built on its site, and later the Prefectural Office.¹⁸Up the valley, Todos os Santos stood until 1619, the city says, and the Japan Tourism Agency's board says it was torn down in 1620; the Zen temple Shuntokuji was built in its place; an old well survives from the time of the church.⁵⁹Nagasaki City registers the site as a prefectural historic site, and records that the seminary, college and printing press came there for a time in 1597, a novitiate in 1602 and 1605, and the seminary of Arima in 1612.⁵

The narrow cape of pines that Torres asked for was meant for Christians with nowhere else to go. For a generation, it was where they went.