Nagasaki travel guide

Top 10 sights in Nagasaki

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1. 

   1© Kawahara Keiga · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Dejima

   A fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbour that was the sole point of contact between Japan and the West from 1641 to 1859, when the Dutch East India Company was confined to it. Reclamation swallowed it; the warehouses and the factory chief's house have been rebuilt on the excavated footprint.

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   Ōura Church

   The oldest church building surviving in Japan, built in 1864 for foreign residents and dedicated to the twenty-six martyrs of 1597. Hidden Christians who had kept the faith for two centuries without priests revealed themselves to its French priest in 1865; it is a National Treasure and World Heritage site.

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3. 

   3© 663highland · CC BY 2.5

   Urakami Cathedral

   The cathedral of Nagasaki's Urakami district, raised by descendants of the hidden Christians and completed in 1925 as the largest church in East Asia. The atomic bomb of 9 August 1945 burst barely 500 metres away and levelled it; the present building dates from 1959, with scorched statues kept outside.

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4. 

   4© STA3816 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Nagasaki Peace Park

   A memorial park on the hill north of the hypocentre of the bomb dropped on 9 August 1945, whose ten-metre Peace Statue points one hand at the sky for the threat from above and holds the other out level for peace. The Atomic Bomb Museum and the hypocentre park are a short walk away.

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5. 

   5© Yoshio Kohara · CC BY 3.0

   Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum

   The museum of the Nagasaki bombing, which killed about 74,000 people at 11.02 on 9 August 1945. Its exhibits work outward from personal objects — a clock stopped at that minute, a water tower, a school wall — and it also covers the history of nuclear weapons since.

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   Glover Garden

   A hillside park gathering the surviving Western merchant houses of the treaty-port years around the 1863 home of Thomas Glover, the Scot who supplied ships and arms to the reformers who ended the shogunate. Its view over the harbour is tied to Puccini's Madama Butterfly by local tradition.

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   Suwa Shrine

   The principal Shinto shrine of Nagasaki, rebuilt in 1857 after fire, reached by 277 stone steps with the city spread out below. It is the base of the Nagasaki Kunchi festival each October, a three-day event with Chinese dragon dances that reflects the port's mixed history.

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   Sōfuku-ji Temple

   An Ōbaku Zen temple founded in 1629 by a monk from Fuzhou as the family temple of Nagasaki's Chinese community. Its Chinese-built entrance gate and main hall are National Treasures — the only Ming-style buildings of their kind in Japan.

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9. 

   9© No machine-readable author provided. Fk assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum and Monument

   A monument and museum on Nishizaka hill, built in 1962 for the centenary of the canonisation of the twenty-six Christians crucified on this spot on 5 February 1597. A bronze relief of the twenty-six stands where the crosses were.

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10. 

    10© Atsasebo · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Endo Shusaku Literary Museum

    A museum on the coast at Sotome devoted to Endō Shūsaku, whose novel Silence is set among the hidden Christians of this shore. It stands looking out at the sea he described, near the villages where the faith survived underground.

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1. 

   1© ぱちょぴ（pacyopi） · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Sannō Shrine

   A shrine about 800 metres southeast of the hypocentre, whose stone torii lost one leg to the blast and still stands on the other. Two camphor trees behind it, burned bare in 1945 and thought dead, put out leaves the following spring and are living monuments.

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2. 

   2© Aude · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims

   A memorial hall of 2003 beside the Atomic Bomb Museum, holding the register of the dead in a glass column lit from above, with twelve pillars of light rising through a pool of water. It is a place of silence rather than exhibition.

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3. 

   3© そらみみ (Soramimi) · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Nagasaki Shinchi Chinatown

   One of Japan's three great Chinatowns, in a quarter reclaimed in 1698 for Chinese traders, and the birthplace of Nagasaki champon and sara udon. The Lantern Festival at Chinese New Year fills the streets with fifteen thousand lanterns.

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4. 

   4© Masoud Akbari · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Fukusai-ji Temple

   An Ōbaku Zen temple of 1628 founded for Chinese from Zhangzhou, whose halls were destroyed in 1945. A vast statue of Kannon on a turtle was built on the site in 1979, with a Foucault pendulum hanging inside it.

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   Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum

   The prefectural art museum, opened in 2005 in a Kuma Kengo building that bridges a canal, with a glass corridor over the water. Its collection is built on Spanish painting — an unexpected strength, from a local collector's bequest.

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   6© Naokijp · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Siebold Memorial Museum

   A museum opened on 1 October 1989 at Narutaki on the site of Philipp Franz von Siebold's house, where the Dejima physician taught Japanese students Western medicine in the 1820s. He was expelled for possessing maps; his herbarium made Japanese plants known in Europe.

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7. 

   7© Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture

   A museum of history and culture in a reconstruction of the Nagasaki magistrate's office, devoted to the theme of overseas exchange. A courtroom of the shogunate is reconstructed and used for reenacted trials, and the trade documents are the substance.

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   Kōfuku-ji Temple

   The oldest Chinese temple in Japan, an Ōbaku Zen temple of 1620 in the Teramachi district, whose Chinese-style main hall is an Important Cultural Property. The monk Ingen, who brought the Ōbaku school to Japan, stayed here in 1654.

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9. 

   9© 663highland · CC BY 2.5

   Isahaya Park

   A park at Isahaya in Nagasaki prefecture laid out in the Taishō period on the ruins of Isahaya castle, also called Azalea Park. About 100,000 azaleas flower in mid-April and the festival is held around 10 April.

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10. 

    10© Atsasebo · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Kushima Castle

    A castle at Ōmura built in 1599 by the Ōmura family, Japan's first Christian daimyo line, on a promontory into Ōmura Bay so that the sea forms part of its defence. Its stone walls and the shrine inside remain; the airport is a short way across the water.

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