Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 423, The City on the Edge of Forever, Part 2.

Nagasaki today is one of the premier cities of Kyushu, but when it began, it was a humble place.

The city had six Machi, a sort of combination main street and city block arrangement,

and maybe a thousand residents

in total, mostly Japanese Christians.

The most important thing about the city was not its size, but its organization.

The city had been built explicitly as a Christian outpost, and while the Jesuits did not

govern the port outright, it was still technically within

the domains of Nagasaki Jin Zayamon, a retainer of the Christian Lord Omura Sumitata,

they still exercised an outsized influence on the city.

The easiest way to see that is the geography of early Nagasaki, which was centered around

a jut of land

on the western side of the Urukami River.

The city's first church was right at the tip of that land tongue, the very first thing a ship

entering the harbor would see.

Despite the faith of its residents, for most, including arguably Christians, the key to

Nagasaki was not religion but trade.

After all, the port had been set up as a destination for the yearly Portuguese carrick from Macau.

That trade income was why Nagasaki Jinzaiemon had been willing to let the Jesuits make use of his harbor,

where previously he had preferred the more traditional trade and smuggled goods from China.

The Jesuits had used the cudgel of the Karak to get Nagasaki in the first place,

promising that if they were allowed to set up a Christian port in Omura Sumitada's lands,

...