When the Jesuits arrived in Japan in the late 16th century they received permission to transform this small fishing port into the headquarters of their missionary work. It became a city with a heavy foreign influence, with much international trade passing through the city in the Edo period. In 1945 it was hit by an atomic bomb.

At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945 a plutonium implosion bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki. The yield was 22 kilotons. The damage was less extensive, due partly to the geography of the Nagasaki area and partly to the fact that the bomb was dropped about 2 miles off target. Of the 286,000 people living in Nagasaki at the time of the blast, 74,000 were killed and another 75,000 sustained injuries. See; Fission Bomb, Implosion Weapon, Manhattan Project.

Japanese target of the second atomic bomb on 9 August 1945