Wakasa Bay Historic District

Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the ports of Wakasa Bay served as the main gateway between Kyoto and continental Asia. Ships from as far as the Korean Peninsula and Kyushu brought statues, ceramics, sutras, and unusual goods through ports like Obama and Tsuruga. In 1408, one ship arrived at Obama carrying what records describe as Japan's first elephant, later presented to the Ashikaga shogun. Jesuit missionaries also passed through in the sixteenth century, and two local men, Yohoken Paulo and his son Toin Vicente, made significant translations of Christian texts into Japanese. The exhibition section includes a Chinese Buddhist statue of Karura washed ashore in 1990, still wrapped in fragments of its original vermilion cloth.