Three days in Nagasaki: the one harbour Japan kept open when it shut the world out

Two nights in one hotel: the Dutch island and Chinatown on arrival, the bombed northern suburb on the full day, and the foreign quarter on the hill before you leave.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Nagasaki
Places
7 across 3 days
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For more than two hundred years, while the rest of Japan was closed, one fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbour was the only place a European could trade. The Dutch lived on Dejima and were not allowed off it. Chinese merchants had a walled quarter of their own a few streets away. Everything foreign that entered Japan in that period came through this one port, and the city still tastes of it.

When the country opened again in the 1850s the traders came back and built on the southern hillside, which is why Nagasaki has Victorian verandas looking down at a Chinese temple, a Confucian shrine, and Catholic churches in a country with very few of them.

On the morning of 9 August 1945 an American aircraft that could not see its primary target at Kokura came here instead and detonated a plutonium bomb over the northern suburb of Urakami. Around seventy four thousand people were dead by the end of the year. The city that grew back is neither morbid nor evasive about it, and the northern half of these three days is given over to it.

Nagasaki is built up the sides of a narrow harbour, so the whole city is either a slope or a tram ride. Three days is enough: an afternoon in the old trading centre, a full day in the north, and a last morning on the hill.

Highlights

  • Dejima, the walled island where Europe was allowed to stand and no further
  • The Peace Park and the museum below it, done in the right order
  • Champon eaten in the oldest Chinatown in Japan
  • The harbour at night from the top of Inasayama, with the city in a V below you

Where to stay

Nagasaki, two nights

One base for all three days. The city runs north to south along the water with a tram line down the spine of it, so nothing here is more than twenty minutes from anything else.

The city has three parts and they are best taken one at a time: the old trading centre in the middle, Urakami in the north, and the foreign hillside in the south.

Day by day

Day 1 in Nagasaki

Dejima, Chinatown and the night view

The first afternoon covers the two foreign quarters that the closed period allowed, both of them within ten minutes of each other in the flat middle of town.

Then go up. Inasayama, across the harbour, is best after dark, and the ropeway takes minutes from a stop on the tram line. Eat first: there is a restaurant at the top and it is not the reason to be there.

  1. 14:30

    Dejima (Site of the Former Dutch Factory)

    Nature

    The fan-shaped island where the Dutch East India Company was confined for over two hundred years, cut off from the town by a single guarded bridge. The harbour was filled in around it long ago, so it is now dry land, but the warehouses, the chief factor's residence and the kitchens have been rebuilt on the original foundations and furnished. Allow ninety minutes. The best exhibit is a scale model that makes the sheer smallness of the place obvious.

  2. 17:00

    Shinchi Chinatown

    Eat

    Four short streets meeting at a crossroads, five minutes on foot from Dejima, and the oldest Chinatown in Japan: Chinese merchants were trading from this quarter while the Dutch were still stuck on their island. Come for champon at its source. In February the whole quarter is strung with lanterns for the Chinese New Year festival, which is the biggest event in the city's year.

  3. 19:00

    Inasayama

    Nature

    A 333 metre hill on the far side of the harbour, reached by a ropeway that runs until eight in the evening, with an observation deck at the top. Nagasaki spreads out below in a narrow V of lights around black water, and it is routinely put among the three best night views in Japan. Go up on a clear evening or do not bother going up at all.

With more time: Sofuku-ji, ten minutes east, was built in 1629 by the city's Chinese community with timber and craftsmen shipped from Fujian, and it is one of the best surviving pieces of Ming architecture anywhere, including in China. Its vermilion gate is startling in a Japanese street.

Day 2 in Nagasaki

Urakami: the Peace Park, the museum and the cathedral

The bomb went off over Urakami, a few kilometres north of the old centre, at two minutes past eleven in the morning. The park, the museum and the cathedral all stand within a few hundred metres of the hypocentre, and the order that works is park, museum, cathedral: the museum is the part that takes it out of you, and the cathedral is where the day should end.

Give this a full day even though the walking is short. Nobody comes out of the museum wanting to do something else immediately, and the tram back into town is a good hour to have nothing planned.

  1. 09:00

    Nagasaki Peace Park

    Nature

    A terraced park above the hypocentre, built around a bronze figure nearly ten metres high with one hand pointing at the sky and the other held out flat. Below it, the hypocentre itself is marked by a black stone pillar in an open circle, with a scarred wall of the old cathedral moved there and set up beside it. Water fountains here are memorials in themselves: the dying asked for water.

  2. 10:45

    Atomic Bomb Museum

    Culture

    A spiral of galleries that starts with a stopped clock and works forwards from the morning of 9 August through the physics, the casualties and the decades of argument about nuclear weapons since. It is measured rather than angry and it is very hard going in the middle section. Two hours. There is a cafe at the end and you will want it.

  3. 14:00

    Immaculate Conception Cathedral

    Religious

    Urakami was the Catholic quarter, home to the descendants of Christians who kept the faith in secret for two centuries, and their cathedral was among the largest churches in Asia when the bomb destroyed it five hundred metres away. It was rebuilt in the 1950s. Fragments of the original, including a scorched stone Madonna, are kept inside and in the grounds.

With more time: Back near the station, the Museum of 26 Martyrs stands on the hill where twenty Japanese converts and six European missionaries were crucified in 1597. It explains the whole strange history of Christianity in Japan, from Francis Xavier through two centuries underground, better than anywhere else in the country.

Day 3 in Nagasaki

The foreign hillside: Glover Garden, the Dutch Slope and a Confucian shrine

The last morning belongs to the southern slope, where the traders built once the country reopened. It is steep and it is small: everything below sits within about half a kilometre, connected by stepped lanes with harbour views between the houses.

Start at the top and walk down. Escalators run up the hillside inside Glover Garden, which is the only free ride you will get here.

  1. 09:00

    Glover Garden

    Culture

    A hillside of Western houses from the 1860s onwards, some original to the site and some moved here, laid out as an open-air museum with the best view of the harbour in the city. The centrepiece is the bungalow built for Thomas Glover, the Scottish merchant who armed the men who overthrew the shogunate, and it is the oldest Western-style building left in Japan. Come at opening: coach parties arrive from ten.

  2. 11:00

    Koshibyo Confucius Shrine

    Visit

    Ten minutes downhill, and a genuine surprise: a full Confucian shrine in orange and green, built in 1893 by Nagasaki's Chinese residents with materials and craftsmen from China, said to be the only one outside China built by Chinese hands. Stone disciples line the courtyard. A museum of Chinese history occupies the building behind, and hardly anybody is ever in either.

  3. 12:15

    Dutch Slope

    Other

    The cobbled street the foreign residents walked up to their houses, called the Dutch Slope because for a long time every European in Nagasaki was assumed to be Dutch. It is a five minute walk and a good last one, past old wooden schoolhouses, and the castella shops along the way hand out samples of the honey sponge cake the Portuguese left behind.

With more time: If you would rather spend the morning on the water, this is the slot for the Gunkanjima boat, which leaves from the wharf below the hill and gets you back by early afternoon. Book it before you arrive.

Before you go

Where to stay

Around Nagasaki station is convenient for arriving and a little dead in the evening. The livelier choice is the Shianbashi and Kanko-dori area in the middle of town, which puts the restaurants, Chinatown and Dejima within a walk and the trams at the door.

The southern hillside around Glover Garden has views and a hill to climb every night. Worth it for one night, tiring for three.

Wherever you stay, check where the nearest tram stop is. Nagasaki is long and thin, and walking from one end to the other is not a plan.

Getting in and around

Trains come in on the Nishi-Kyushu Shinkansen, which since 2022 runs from Takeo-Onsen to Nagasaki, with a cross-platform change from the Hakata train. Fukuoka to Nagasaki takes about an hour and a half. Highway buses from Fukuoka take a little over two hours and cost much less.

Nagasaki airport is on a peninsula out in the bay. The fastest limousine buses reach the station in about forty five minutes and take cash only at the platform.

In the city, the trams are the answer to almost everything: a flat fare, a service every ten to fifteen minutes, and a day pass worth buying if you make three trips. They stop around eleven at night, which is worth remembering before a long dinner in Shianbashi.

Gunkanjima, if you want it

Hashima, universally called Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, is a rock fifteen kilometres offshore covered edge to edge in the concrete ruins of a coal mining town. It was abandoned in 1974 and was, at its peak, one of the most densely populated places on earth.

Visiting means a boat tour of about two and a half hours with a guided walk of forty five minutes on the island itself. Book weeks ahead in season, expect it to be cancelled if the sea is up, and wear shoes you can walk in: sandals and heels are refused at the gangway.

It takes half a day, so it replaces a morning rather than fitting between two of them. There is a memorial on the island to the Korean labourers forced to work the mines.

Eating and drinking

Champon is the city's dish and it was invented here: thick noodles in a cloudy pork and seafood broth, invented by a Chinese restaurateur for hungry students. Sara-udon is the same idea fried crisp. Both are in every Chinatown window.

Castella, a dense honey sponge cake, arrived with Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century and stayed. The old shops sell it in wooden boxes and hand out samples.

Toruko raisu, Turkish rice, has nothing to do with Turkey: a pork cutlet, dry curried rice and spaghetti on one plate. It is the sort of thing a port city invents and Nagasaki is not embarrassed about it.

Nagasaki spent two centuries as the only crack in a closed country, and it has the Chinese temples, Dutch warehouses and Catholic churches to prove it. Then it lost half of itself in one morning in 1945 and rebuilt around the hole.

Take the tram, climb the hill at dusk, and give the second day the whole day.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

How does Nagasaki compare with Hiroshima?
Hiroshima's memorial sits in the middle of a rebuilt city centre and is impossible to avoid. Nagasaki's is out in a northern suburb, and the rest of the city carries on being a Chinese and European port town. Seeing both is not repetitive, and Nagasaki's museum is the more detailed of the two on the physics and the aftermath.
Is two nights enough?
Two nights covers the three parts of the city at a comfortable pace. Add a third if you want Gunkanjima, which eats a morning and can be cancelled by weather.
How steep is it?
Very, away from the harbour front. The tram covers the flat spine and the hills are done in short bursts. The southern hillside has escalators and a lift built into it for residents, and visitors use them too.
When should I go?
February for the lantern festival in Chinatown, which is the city at its best. October for the Kunchi festival. Avoid the rainy season in June if you can, because a wet Nagasaki is a lot of slippery steps.
Can I change the days around?
Copy the trip and rearrange it as you like. The one thing worth keeping is the order inside the second day, because the museum is not something to walk into cold.