 In the 16th century, the local Japanese people initially assumed that the Portuguese were from "Tenjiku" ("Heavenly Abode"), the Japanese name for the Indian subcontinent due to its importance as the birthplace of Buddhism, and that Christianity was a new Indian faith.These mistaken assumptions were due to the Indian city of Goa being a central base for the Portuguese East India Company and also due to a significant portion of the crew on Portuguese ships being Indian Christians.In the 16th and 17th centuries, Portuguese visitors and their South Asian (and sometimes African) crew members often engaged in slavery in Japan, where they brought or captured young Japanese women and girls, who were either used as sexual slaves on their ships or taken to Macau and other Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia, the Americas and India.