Tempura reached Japan through a port once run by Jesuits
Nagasaki began in 1571 as a harbour built for Portuguese ships, and for a few years after 1580 it was governed by the Jesuits. Through it came tobacco, bread, the sponge cake castella and a Lenten fried-vegetable dish that became tempura, before Japan shut out Catholic Europe almost entirely.
Europeans first reached Japan in 1543, when a storm-blown vessel carrying Portuguese sailors landed on Tanegashima, bringing firearms and Christianity. Francis Xavier arrived in 1549, and his successors converted several lords, notably Ōmura Sumitada, who in 1569 authorised a port for Portuguese trade. Portuguese merchants became go-betweens with China, with which Japan had cut ties over piracy, and exports through the city were estimated at 3,000,000 cruzados by 1637. Tempura's name is thought to come from the Portuguese word for seasoning, linked to the forty meatless days of Lent.
Politics soon turned. Toyotomi Hideyoshi took the city under his direct control in 1587 and ordered missionaries out, though the order went largely unenforced. The Tokugawa shogunate banned Catholicism outright in 1614, and after the Christian-tinged Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 the Portuguese were expelled. Their trading post, the artificial island of Dejima, passed to the Dutch, while Chinese merchants lived in a walled compound nearby; by one estimate up to a third of residents were Chinese.
Historians once called Nagasaki Japan's only window on the world during its isolation, a view now rejected because trade also flowed through Satsuma, Tsushima and Matsumae. Still, when a ban on Dutch books was lifted in 1720, scholars flocked there to study European science, making it the heart of rangaku, Dutch learning. In 1808 the British frigate HMS Phaeton forced its way into the harbour, and the humiliated magistrate took his own life.
Nagasaki became a treaty port in 1859, and once Christianity was legalised, hidden Christians emerged and the city regained its Catholic role; their sites are now on UNESCO's World Heritage list. Mitsubishi shipyards and arms works made it an industrial hub, which in 1945 made it a target: it became the second city ever struck by an atomic bomb. Rebuilt, it had an estimated 392,281 residents in February 2024.
Source: Nagasaki
