Nagasaki

I arrived in Nagasaki by train through a sequence of tunnels and emerged into a city that sits in a bowl of hills, the harbor glinting at the bottom, the houses climbing every slope in irregular terraces. The geography is immediately unusual for Japan — there is nothing flat about Nagasaki, nothing gridded, nothing that suggests a city laid out by planners with a ruler. It grew the way port cities in the Mediterranean grow, pragmatically, upward, spilling along ridges and into every flat patch above the waterline. I took the tram from the station because the tram is ancient and slow and the best possible way to pass through a place you want to look at carefully.

The city’s Portuguese and Dutch history is not a museum artifact — it is woven into the food, the architecture, and the cake. Castella, the sponge cake the Portuguese missionaries brought in the sixteenth century, is sold in wooden boxes at every patisserie in town, and the good versions are deeply yellow from egg yolk and have a caramelized crust that tears off in sheets. I ate three slices in one afternoon, from three different shops, because when a city has been arguing about who makes the best castella for four hundred years you owe it some respect. Champon noodle soup — a Nagasaki invention, thick broth loaded with seafood and vegetables that the Chinese cooks in the old quarter developed — is nothing like anything else in Japan. I had a bowl at a counter restaurant in Shinchi Chinatown, steam fogging my glasses, the broth going straight through the cold I’d developed on the ferry.

The atomic bomb hypocenter is a twenty-minute walk from Chinatown. I had read about it, looked at photographs, knew what I was walking toward, and still found myself unprepared for the simplicity of it — a low black obelisk in a small plaza, a plaque describing the exact coordinates, a few flowers in a stone vase. The park around it is quiet in a way that feels deliberate, as if the city collectively decided that this particular silence should be protected. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum nearby tells the full story with a restraint I found more affecting than spectacle. I walked in at two in the afternoon and came out at dusk feeling wrung out and oddly grateful — for the careful way the museum handled its material, for the city that rebuilt itself without pretending the wound wasn’t there.

Up on the Glover Garden hill, the old Western trading houses — built by the Scottish merchant Thomas Glover and his contemporaries in the mid-nineteenth century — look down over the harbor with their deep verandas and their iron-frame roofs. It is a strange and beautiful collision of Japanese and Victorian architecture, and on a clear evening the light on the water below is the kind of deep copper that makes you want to stay exactly where you are. A woman at the entrance was selling roasted sweet potatoes from a cart. I bought one and ate it on a bench looking out over the harbor, warm and starchy and sweet, and I thought about all the ships that had come and gone and what they had left behind.

When to go: Spring and early autumn are ideal — the hills are green, the temperatures mild, and the summer festival crowds have not yet arrived or have gone. The Okunchi Festival in early October fills the streets with dragon dances and brings a particular wild energy to an otherwise contemplative city. Avoid late August heat and the height of summer humidity if possible.