ABSTRACT
Nagasaki, located in what the Poet perceived across the horizon as the ‘remotest Islands of the East,’ was for two-thirds of a century the terminus of Portuguese trade routes in Asia.1 Lying at the very end of the trajectory of their maritime expansion, the city occupied a place of obvious importance in the early modern imperial world of the Portuguese. In today’s Portuguese academic world as well, it occupies a singular position. Indeed, scholars inspired by a romantic vision of Nagasaki’s historical character have, in a manner of speaking, annexed this Japanese city to Portugal. Here is a conspectus of that idealized view:
e Portuguese created Nagasaki in their own image. Certainly, a Japanesestyle urban settlement ‘could never have come into existence’ in the hilly terrain that cradled this city. Whereas other Japanese towns, laid out after the Chinese model, were located on flat ground and constrained by a rectangular plan resembling a checkerboard, Nagasaki alone sprawled spontaneously up and down the hillsides, following an irregular pattern that is distinctly Portuguese and was replicated at most of the settlements founded by the Portuguese overseas. Nagasaki dates back to the sixteenth century, but ‘even today’ it bears the stamp of its foundation, as its irregular contours distinguish it from any other Japanese urban agglomeration.2
