Suwa Shrine
The official date of construction for Suwa Shrine is 1614, the same year as Tokugawa Ieyasu's Edict against Christianity, although there was little more than a small structure to mark the position of the future shrine at this time. At that time, Nagasaki was home to the largest Christian population in Japan, and had destroyed many of the former Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. The Tokugawa Shogunate had taken power and reversed its friendly policy towards Christianity. The government had begun forcing Christians to reconvert to the Japanese religions of Buddhism and Shinto. It was thought that establishing a major point of Shinto worship would be important to these efforts, giving the local population a central point of worship and a sense of community.