Site of Todos os Santos Church
This is the site of Todos os Santos (All Saints), Nagasaki’s first church, built in 1569. The land was granted to merchant-turned-Jesuit-missionary Luis de Almeida by Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, a retainer of Omura Sumitada (1533–1587), the first Christian daimyo. Father Gaspar Vilela, a Jesuit priest who arrived in Japan in 1556 and went on to write extensively about the country, converted the Buddhist temple which previously stood here into a church. From the late 1590s, the site hosted a seminary, a college, and a letterpress-printing machine. There was a monastery here between 1602 and 1605, and when the Arima domain abandoned Christianity in 1612, the Arima seminary was also relocated here.
Todos os Santos was torn down in 1620, six years after the shogunate’s nationwide ban on Christianity, and replaced by this Zen temple, Shuntokuji. The current temple building was constructed in the late Edo period (1603–1868), but the well is believed to date from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when the church was still extant.