Dejima

In 1636 the shogunate finished building an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, fan-shaped, about 120 metres across, connected to the city by a single guarded bridge. It was built to contain Portuguese traders. Two years later the Portuguese were expelled entirely, and in 1641 the Dutch East India Company was moved onto the empty island from Hirado.

For the next 218 years, that fan of reclaimed mud was the only place in Japan where Westerners could legally live, and the only channel through which European goods and ideas entered the country.

What actually crossed the bridge

Not much silk, in the end. The lasting cargo was information. Japanese scholars developed an entire discipline around it — rangaku, "Dutch learning" — and it reshaped the country from inside a closed border.

In 1774 a group of physicians published the Kaitai Shinsho, a translation of a Dutch anatomical atlas, after attending a dissection and discovering that the Chinese medical texts they had trusted were wrong about human bodies. Astronomy, cartography, gunnery, chemistry, and eventually the vocabulary of modern Japanese science all came through here. So did badminton, billiards, coffee, beer and chocolate.

A country that had sealed itself shut kept exactly one window open, and spent two centuries staring through it.

Life on the island

Perhaps fifteen to twenty Dutchmen lived here at a time, plus Japanese servants, interpreters and officials. They could not leave without permission. The opperhoofd, the chief factor, made a ceremonial journey to Edo to pay respects to the shogun — a round trip of some three months, and one of the very few times any European saw the interior of Japan.

Two doctors who served here became the West's eyes on Japan: Engelbert Kaempfer in the 1690s, whose posthumous history shaped European ideas of the country for a century, and Philipp Franz von Siebold in the 1820s, who was eventually expelled for possessing maps of Japan — a capital offence for the Japanese who gave them to him.

What you see today

Dejima stopped being an island. Land reclamation in the Meiji era swallowed the water around it, and the fan shape vanished into the city grid. Since the 1990s Nagasaki has been excavating and rebuilding it — sixteen buildings restored so far, room by room, from Dutch and Japanese records: the chief factor's residence with its imported furniture, the warehouses, the kitchen, the sea gate.

It is a small site and an unglamorous one, and I would still put it first. Everything else in this city — the churches, the Chinese temples, the cake made with Portuguese technique, the fact that Japan's modernisation had a specific address — starts here.