About this item
Highlights
- Nagasaki, on the west coast of the Japanese island of Kyushu, is known in the West for having been the target of an atomic bomb attack on August 9, 1945.
- About the Author: Reinier H. Hesselink is the author of Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Diplomacy (2002) and many articles on Japanese and world history in English, Dutch, Japanese, and Portuguese journals and other scholarly publications.
- 300 Pages
- History, World
Description
About the Book
"Nagasaki, on the west coast of the Japanese island of Kyushu, is known for having been the target of an atomic bomb attack on August 9, 1945. This book is the first comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Christian Nagasaki (1560-1640). The author provides narrative of the city's early years from European and Japanese perspective"--Book Synopsis
Nagasaki, on the west coast of the Japanese island of Kyushu, is known in the West for having been the target of an atomic bomb attack on August 9, 1945. Less well known is that the city was founded by Europeans, Jesuit missionaries who arrived in the area in the second half of the 16th century. The Jesuits had come to convert the Japanese. After baptizing a Japanese lord or daimyo of the area, they established Nagasaki in 1571 to provide the Portuguese a safe harbor in his domain. Profits for the daimyo and the Japanese who converted to Christianity soon followed.
This book is the first comprehensive history in any language of the rise and fall of Christian Nagasaki (1560-1640). The author provides a narrative of the city's early years from both the European and Japanese perspectives.
Review Quotes
"clearly the product of countless hours of painstaking historical investigation. The resultant study is nothing if not a model of thorough research...Hesselink's book amounts virtually to a gazetteer of the early Catholic missions to Japan"-Journal of American-East Asian Relations; "a persuasive and illustrative story...Hesselink deserves considerable credit for even undertaking this monumental task. His meticulously researched and readable text certainly advances the stud of Christianity and foreign trade in early Nagasaki"-Monumenta Nipponica.
About the Author
Reinier H. Hesselink is the author of Prisoners from Nambu: Reality and Make-Believe in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Diplomacy (2002) and many articles on Japanese and world history in English, Dutch, Japanese, and Portuguese journals and other scholarly publications. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
