Kyushu

The island facing the continent, and therefore the place where almost everything foreign entered Japan first. Kyushu is closer to Korea than to Tokyo, and the archaeology shows rice agriculture, bronze and iron arriving through it in the Yayoi period. Hakata, now part of Fukuoka, was the official port for embassies to Tang China and the point where the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281 landed and were destroyed by storms. Christianity arrived at Kagoshima with Francis Xavier in 1549 and took root in Kyushu more than anywhere else, producing the Christian daimyo, the Shimabara rebellion of 1637 and, after suppression, the hidden Christian communities that kept a mutated liturgy in secret for two centuries. When the country closed, the single authorised window stayed here: the Dutch factory on Dejima island in Nagasaki harbour, through which all Western science reached Japan until 1854. The southern domain of Satsuma was half-detached from the shogunate, traded illicitly through the Ryukyus, and led the Meiji Restoration; its former retainers then rebelled against the government they had created in 1877, the last stand of the samurai class. Industrialisation followed the coal, with the Yawata steelworks of 1901 becoming the centre of Japanese heavy industry. Nagasaki was the target of the second atomic bomb on 9 August 1945, chosen only because cloud covered Kokura. The island remains Japan's most agriculturally productive and its warmest, and Fukuoka is now growing faster than most Japanese cities. Mount Aso holds one of the world's largest volcanic calderas. Kumamoto castle was heavily damaged in the 2016 earthquake. Kyushu's hot springs at Beppu are the most productive in Japan. Fukuoka is closer to Seoul than to Tokyo.

• Existed: 700 CE – present
• Type: Entity