Dejima

Dejima is a fan-shaped artificial island in the middle of Nagasaki. For more than two hundred years it was the only place in Japan where Europeans were allowed to live and trade, and almost everything the country learned of the West came through it. The island was swallowed by land reclamation a century ago, and has been rebuilt since.

Work began in 1634 and the island was finished in 1636. It was made to hold the Portuguese living in Nagasaki, so that they could trade without moving freely about the city.

That did not last. The Portuguese were banned from coming to Japan in 1639, and the island stood empty until 1641, when the Dutch trading factory was moved down from Hirado. The Dutch stayed for the next two hundred and eighteen years.

Through those years the country was closed, and Dejima was the single opening in it. Goods came in through this gate, and so did books, instruments, medicine and news. The physicians attached to the factory taught Japanese students what Europe knew, and what Japan learned of Western science before the country reopened came largely from this island.

The factory was closed in 1859, when Japan opened its ports, and the island became a consulate and then part of the foreign settlement.

Dejima stopped being an island in 1904, when harbour works and reclamation joined it to the shore and buried its outline in the growing city. The site was made a National Historic Site in 1922.

Reconstruction began in 1996 and has gone on in stages ever since. The warehouses, the chief factor's house and the deputy's house have been rebuilt on their excavated foundations, in the form they had around 1820, and the later buildings of the treaty-port years stand alongside them.