Nagasaki

Top things to do in Nagasaki

1. 01

   Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum - the record of 9 August 1945

   history 👍 Popular

   The museum stands above the Urakami valley and works through the day in sequence: the city beforehand, the weapon, the minutes after, the injuries and the deaths, and the medical record of what followed, told largely through objects recovered from the ruins and the testimony of survivors. A clock stopped at 11:02, melted glass, a water tank. It is explicit and does not warn you around corners. Allow about two hours.

2. 02

   Hypocentre Park - the point below the detonation

   history

   A black stone pillar in a sunken park marks the spot the bomb went off above, and a section of the brick side wall of the destroyed cathedral has been moved down the hill to stand beside it. One corner leaves a stratum of 1945 debris exposed under glass, at the level the ground was then. It is a short walk below the museum and takes ten minutes.

3. 03

   Nagasaki Peace Park - the Peace Statue and the fountain

   history

   The park occupies the terrace above the hypocentre, on ground that held a prison whose foundations are left exposed at the northern edge. Seibo Kitamura's bronze, unveiled in 1955 and about ten metres tall, sits with the right hand raised towards the sky the weapon came from and the left held out level. The fountain at the entrance carries the words of a girl who wrote about searching for water afterwards, and countries around the world have added monuments along the length of the park.

4. 04

   Urakami Cathedral - rebuilt on the same ground

   history

   The Catholics of the Urakami valley finished a brick cathedral here in 1925 after decades of building it largely themselves, and it was the largest church in East Asia. It stood a few hundred metres from the point of the detonation and thousands of the parish were killed. What was left was cleared and a new cathedral was built in 1959; scorched stone saints stand along the wall, a piece of the old belfry lies below the church where the blast dropped it, and one of the bells was recovered and hung again. It is a working parish church rather than a memorial.

5. 05

   Sanno Shrine - the one-legged torii

   history

   Half a stone torii still stands on the approach to Sanno Shrine, southeast of the hypocentre: the blast took one pillar and the near half of the crossbeam and left the rest upright, and the city decided not to repair it. Two huge camphor trees in the grounds were stripped and burned through, survived, and are now designated natural monuments, with the scarring and lodged debris still visible in the trunks.

6. 06

   Dejima - the Dutch trading post

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   A fan-shaped island was built in the harbour in 1636 to confine the Portuguese, and once they were expelled the Dutch East India Company was moved onto it in 1641. For the next two hundred years this was the only place in Japan where Europeans could legally live, and every Western book, instrument and idea that entered the country crossed its one guarded bridge. Land reclamation swallowed the island in the Meiji years and the city has been putting it back building by building since the 1950s - the chief factor's residence, the warehouses, the kitchen and the sea gate, furnished as they were, with a stretch of the original stone sea wall left exposed.

7. 07

   Glover Garden - the merchant houses above the port

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   Thomas Blake Glover, a Scottish trader who arrived at twenty-one in 1859, built a bungalow on the slope above the foreign settlement in 1863 that is the oldest surviving Western-style wooden house in Japan. He armed the domains that overthrew the shogunate, brought in the country's first steam locomotive, and started the slip dock that became the Mitsubishi shipyard below. Several more merchant houses were moved here to join his, moving walkways carry you up the hill, and the terrace looks down on the working port and its cranes. Madame Butterfly is set in this city and the garden leans on it, with statues of Puccini and of the soprano who made the role hers.

8. 08

   Oura Church - the oldest church in Japan

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   French missionaries finished this small white Gothic church on the slope in 1864 for the foreign residents and pointed it at the hill where twenty-six Christians had been executed. Within months a group of villagers from Urakami came in and told the priest, Bernard Petitjean, that their families had held the faith in secret for seven generations without priests, church or scripture. It is a National Treasure and the anchor of the group of hidden-Christian sites inscribed as World Heritage in 2018.

9. 09

   Site of the Martyrdom of the 26 Saints - Nishizaka hill

   history

   Twenty-six Christians, six of them European friars and the youngest a boy of twelve, were marched overland from Kyoto and Osaka in winter and crucified on this hill above the harbour in 1597 on Hideyoshi's order. Yasutake Funakoshi's bronze relief of the twenty-six, unveiled in 1962, stands where it happened, with a museum behind it holding letters, images and hidden objects from the underground centuries and Kenji Imai's mosaic-covered twin-towered church alongside. It is a few minutes uphill from the station.

10. 10

    Mount Inasa - the night view over the harbour

    scenic 👍 Popular

    A ropeway climbs from a shrine on the western shore to a glass-walled deck at 333 m, where the city reads as a bowl of light wrapped around a black harbour with the shipyard cranes picked out along the far side. It turns up in every list of the great night views and it earns it. Go up before dark to see the geography first and stay while the lights come on; there is a road to the summit as well, and a shuttle bus from the central hotels.

11. 11

    Megane-bashi - the Spectacles Bridge and the Nakashima stone bridges

    history scenic

    A Chinese monk from Kofukuji threw this double stone arch across the Nakashima in 1634, the oldest bridge of its kind in Japan; the two arches and their reflections make the spectacles the name refers to. A run of small stone bridges follows the river upstream through a quarter of old shops and coffee houses, and people work along the embankment hunting the heart-shaped stones set into it. A flood in 1982 destroyed several of the bridges and they were rebuilt from the stone recovered downstream.

12. 12

    Sofukuji and Kofukuji - the Chinese temples

    history culture arts

    Nagasaki's Fujian and Nanjing merchant communities built their own temples in the 1620s, in a southern Chinese style with none of the Japanese restraint: Sofukuji's vermilion gate and its main hall are both National Treasures, shipped over in pieces and assembled here, and the temple keeps the enormous cauldron it once cooked famine relief in. Kofukuji, up the hill on the temple road, was the first Obaku Zen temple in Japan and the seed of a whole school - the monk Ingen passed through it, and gets the credit for bringing both the kidney bean and steeped-leaf tea to the country.

13. 13

    Shinchi Chinatown - champon and sara udon

    food

    The oldest Chinatown in Japan, four gates and a pair of crossing lanes on land reclaimed for Chinese warehouses in the 1690s. Champon was invented here to feed poor Chinese students: pork, seafood and cabbage fried in one pot and then simmered with thick noodles in a milky broth. Sara udon is the same idea over crisp fried noodles with a bottle of Worcester sauce on the table, and the shop windows sell steamed pork-belly buns and sesame dumplings to eat on the move.

14. 14

    Castella - the Portuguese sponge cake

    food

    Portuguese missionaries brought a keeping cake to the port in the sixteenth century and Nagasaki made it its own: eggs, flour and sugar, no butter, baked in a deep frame to a fine damp honey-heavy crumb with a layer of coarse sugar crystals left at the base. One of the houses that dominate it has been baking since the 1620s, the boxed loaves are what the rest of Japan brings home from here, and offcuts are sold cheaply if you only want to try it.

15. 15

    Hashima - the abandoned coal island

    history off beaten path

    A bare rock out in the sea off the city was walled, extended and built up over a Mitsubishi undersea coal mine until it held thousands of people on a few hectares, in what was Japan's first large concrete apartment block and, at its peak, the densest population on earth. The mine closed in 1974 and everyone was gone within months, leaving a silhouette like a warship that gives the island its nickname, Gunkanjima. Tour boats run out from the waterfront and land at a fixed walkway on the southern tip when the sea allows. Korean and Chinese labourers were brought here under coercion during the war, and the island's World Heritage listing in 2015 was contested on exactly that point.

16. 16

    Suwa Shrine - the guardian shrine and the Kunchi

    culture arts history

    A long flight of stone steps climbs to the shrine the shogunate promoted in 1625 to pull the city back from Christianity, and it is still the city's guardian shrine. Its autumn festival is the loudest thing in the Nagasaki year and looks like nowhere else in Japan: a Chinese dragon run by teams of men, a whale float spouting water, Dutch-styled ships hauled and spun on the flagstones, with the old neighbourhoods taking their turn to perform on a seven-year rotation.

17. 17

    Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture - the magistrate's office

    culture arts history

    Built on the site of the shogunate's Nagasaki magistracy and partly reconstructing it, down to the courtroom where suspected Christians were tried, this is the clearest single explanation of why the city is not like the rest of Japan: the Dutch and Chinese trade, the export porcelain and lacquer that went out through the harbour, the Western medicine and astronomy that came back, and the machinery of controlling all of it.

Getting to & around Nagasaki

Know before you go