Yokoseura
port in Japon
Yokoseura (横瀬浦) is a port located at the northern tip of the Nishisonogi Peninsula on the Japanese island of Kyushu, administratively under Saikai city, Nagasaki Prefecture. It was developed as an entrepot by the Portuguese in 1562 with the permission of the local lord Ōmura Sumitada, but was burned down a year later during a rebellion against Sumitada.
History
Background
In 1543, Europeans reached Japan for the first time when a Chinese junk carrying Portuguese traders shipwrecked on Tanegashima. The Portuguese introduced the arquebus to the Japanese during this chance encounter, which gave the Japanese, undergoing the bloody Sengoku period at the time, a powerful weapon with which they conducted their internecine wars. The discovery of Japan was attractive to Portuguese merchants and missionaries alike, for it gave the merchants a new market to trade their goods, and the Jesuit missionaries eyed Japan for new converts into Christianity. Likewise, the warlords of Kyushu vied to get the Portuguese carrack (called the black ship by the Japanese) into their harbours, since the ship also brought considerable wealth to their fiefdoms in addition to the guns.
The Portuguese initially made Hirado their preferred port of call, although they also visited the ports in Satsuma and Bungo from time to time. The Jesuits felt that the carrack should take turns visiting each port of Kyushu so the priests could cover more ground and convert more people, but the merchants had other priorities in mind: the carrack had to land at a harbour that protected their valuable cargo from the wind and weather, and a stable port of call was essential to build a reliable clientele. The daimyō of Hirado, Matsura Takanobu, was initially accommodative to the missionaries due to their association with the Portuguese traders, but turned hostile once he felt they overdid their evangelization by burning books and destroying Buddhist images. Matsura Takanobu evicted the missionaries from Hirado in 1558, and did not allow them to come back for five years.
“Yokoseura” enters the record as port in Japon. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yokoseura, port and Japon can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21655106. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1562, 1543 and 1558.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yokoseura” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.