Nagasaki

We added Nagasaki to our itinerary at the last minute, but it was a very good choice. Far away to the southwest in Kyushu, it is probably best known these days for the plutonium bomb that the US dropped on it in August, 1945. But it has a much longer history (obviously) with some very interesting episodes. 

Before and during the Tokagawa (Edo-) era, it was the only city that allowed Europeans to visit and trade, and there were Portuguese and Dutch living on Dejima island in Nagasaki from the mid-1500s up until the Meiji period. During the Napoleonic era in Europe, when the Netherlands was occupied by the French, Dejima is supposed to have been the only place in the world still flying the Dutch flag.

The first Europeans to visit were the Portuguese, and English readers of the book Shogun will remember the Portuguese priests and traders that pop in and out of the story. The Portuguese did what they did best and converted large numbers of people in Kyushu to Catholicism. The threat was great enough that Toyotomi led persecutions against the Christians, and Tokugawa eventually banned Christianity outright. There is a memorial in town to the 26 Christians who were martyred in Nagasaki in 1597. 

There is also a cathedral, near the site of and mostly destroyed by the atomic bomb blast, that was erected in the late 1800s when French missionaries came to Nagasaki to honor the martyrs. Soon after construction, a crowd gathered of "secret" Christians that had maintained their faith through the persecutions for over 200 years. Apparently they had figurines of the Madonna disguised as Buddhist deities and other tricks of an underground religion.

All of this is to say that, until 1945, Nagasaki was probably the most cosmopolitan city in Japan and today has almost 500 years of history interacting with Europeans. Best of all for us, the first-day rainstorm that we experienced gave way to beautiful spring weather for the next three days, so our overall experience was fantastic.

Walking to the reconstructed Dejima Dutch settlement.

Katie in the atomic bomb museum.

Kids in front of a statue of Sadako Sasaki, the girl memorialized in the English-language book, A Thousand Paper Cranes. She lived in Hiroshima but has become a symbol of peace after her death from leukemia in 1955.