Nagasaki's Christian roots and centuries-old links to the outside world were keys to the city's recovery from the atomic bomb, according to Jesuit priests and historians Diego Yuuki and Jose Aguilar.

Forgiveness and prayer strengthened the recovery of a city that is 10 percent Christian and 90 percent Buddhist and Shintoist, they said.

And the city's traditional openness to the Western World provided the base for a new internationally based economy.

Christianity created Nagasaki and helped mold its character long before the bomb dropped.

Portuguese trader Cosme De Torres arrived on Kyushu island in 1562. Forty years earlier, Torres sailed with Ferdinand Magellan on the first voyage around the world.

In Japan, he converted Japanese lord Omura Sumitada to Christianity, and Sumitada allowed Torres to hunt for a good harbor. In 1570, Torres found Nagasaki's natural harbor on a long cape curling out of Kyushu's northwest corner. In 1571, the Portuguese founded Nagasaki - which means "long cape."

Because of Japanese internal political struggles, Sumitada put Jesuit priests in charge of Nagasaki for several years so rival lords wouldn't attack it and destroy its blooming commerce with Portugal.

But by the 1590s, the central Japanese government took over Nagasaki. Japan's rulers fretted about the Spanish and Portuguese, whose missionaries usually preceded conquering armies.

In 1597, to discourage missionaries from meddling in politics, the government marched six priests and 20 Japanese Christians 800 miles to crucify them in Nagasaki. Before their executions, the 26 preached to the crowd and forgave their executioners.

In 1862, the Roman Catholic Church declared the martyrs Japan's first saints - planting the seeds of Nagasaki's attitude of forgiveness that remain almost 350 years later.

Christianity went underground in the early 1600s as Japan shut itself off from the outside world.

When Japan ordered all Europeans expelled in 1639, only Dutch traders were allowed to remain. Through them, European subjects such as gunnery, medicine, smelting, map-making and astronomy oozed into Japan during its next 215 years of isolation.

That tenuous connection helped Nagasaki blossom into an international city in the late 19th century when Japan reopened itself to the outside world. That openness to the outside world also contributed to Nagasaki's recovery after World War II.