Hakata

In the 14th and 15th centuries Hakata's merchants carried Japan's trade with Ming China, Korea and the Ryūkyū Islands, and one of them, Dōan, even traded in the name of the Ryūkyū king. Raw silk bought in China was said to fetch twenty times its price in Japan. Such wealth made the port a prize for the lords of Kyushu. By the 1430s it was split in two, the harbour quarter of Okinohama with some 6,000 houses under the Ōtomo and the inland Hakatahama with 4,000 under the Shōni, and for decades their retainers and those of the Ōuchi fought in its streets.

In 1559 the rebel Chikushi burned the town to the ground, and when the Jesuit Luís de Almeida came in 1570 he found it overgrown like a forest, with only some twenty houses standing. Recovery came after Toyotomi Hideyoshi conquered Kyushu in 1587: he looked out over the scorched town from a Portuguese ship and had it laid out anew with the help of its merchants. In 1601 Kuroda Nagamasa raised the castle town of Fukuoka across the Naka River, and Hakata lived on beside it as the merchants' half of a twin city.