Japan's most globally shaped city — champon noodles from the Chinese quarter, Glover Garden's colonial mansions, and the Peace Park above the hypocenter
Nagasaki is Japan's most internationally layered city — uniquely shaped by centuries of enforced foreign contact during the Edo-period sakoku (closed country) policy, when Nagasaki's Dejima island was the only point of foreign trade access in all of Japan: Chinese merchants, Dutch traders (the only Europeans permitted), and Korean traders passed through this narrow channel for over 200 years, leaving a city whose food, architecture, and culture is unlike anywhere else in Japan. The Chinese quarter (Chinatown, the oldest in Japan, established 1689) gave Nagasaki champon — a thick, creamy noodl…
Nagasaki was founded as a port in 1570 by the lord Ōmura Sumitada specifically to facilitate Portuguese trade — it was a Portuguese colonial trading city before it was Japanese in character. Jesuit missionaries (Francis Xavier arrived in Japan via Nagasaki in 1549) made Nagasaki Japan's most Christian city; the Tokugawa shogunate's brutal suppression of Christianity (the 26 Martyrs of Japan were crucified in Nagasaki in 1597) and subsequent sakoku policy transformed the city into Japan's only officially permitted point of foreign contact. On August 9, 1945 at 11:02am, the United States droppe…