Japan
Nagasaki
Nagasaki is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen.
It makes me disappointed I didn’t have a better camera to capture it, though it’s so gorgeous of course no camera does it justice. It’s beautiful in a way that made me realize cities depicted in Studio Ghibli films, so fantastical in their vistas and integration with nature, could be inspired by real life places.
The ingredients are actually pretty simple: valley, forests, water:
- A narrow valley
- The valley walls are small mountains, blanketed by trees, with varied tendrils reaching down into the city
- Generous water all around, rivers cutting through the city and emptying into a bay
Around Town
We encountered friendly folks and tranquil, medium-sized-town vibes. After renting bicycles, we spent the first afternoon pedaling all along the water.
We’d only end up spending two days in Nagasaki, but I would have liked to spend a few more, especially in great weather. Good places to eat and drink were a bit hidden and scattered around, which made them even more fun to discover.
Atomic Bomb Museum
As with the one in Hiroshima, the museum is both unsurprising (in that it’s about exactly what it says on the tin), and at the same time quite powerful. I think they are worth visiting to remind you in a deeper way of the obvious.
Riding to the Sunset
A short ride across the river took us to a ropeway, which brings you up to the Mt. Inasa Overlook.
I submit to you that money can’t buy you anything better than riding bicycles in a beautiful place on a warm evening and looking at stuff.
Dejima
I’m a big fan of miniatures.
Japan isolated itself from the world for ~250 years. The exception? Dejima, a teensy man-made island just outside of Nagasaki. It was open for talking/trading first to the Portuguese, then the Dutch.
The Dejima museum in Nagasaki is a fun little indoor/outdoor zone you can walk around and learn about the history and look at artifacts.
My brain is wired to be almost completely intolerant of learning about history. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. It takes me being in a physical place to get interested in its past. (Even then, it’s a crap shoot.) I find a good strategy for historical museums is to just to find stuff I like looking at and try to feel zero guilt about skipping everything else.01
Check out the absolutely wild detail on the plates.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years with exposure to prominent Japanese figures in the media is they nearly always have interpreters. (Ichiro, Marie Kondo, every interview with anyone from Nintendo, etc.) It was interesting to kind of maybe trace back a historical angle on this phenomenon here in some of the captions.
An interpreter team of fifty!!
Glover Garden
Fashioning ourselves history buffs now, we also checked out the Glover Garden, a sort of open-air museum (outdoor escalators!) with pleasant views, old Western-looking buildings, and an uncanny mustached virtual white guy showing up and speaking Japanese.
I’ve got to figure out how to re-enable the audio controls on these videos so you can hear him go.
Two Little Bits
To my horror inspecting this photograph booth, there’s a setting for how white you want it to make you look.
The bucket is just for good measure.
Down to Kagoshima
We left as we arrived, on the somehow cute bubble-nosed sleek-beyond-belief Shinkansen at the end of its line.
Chronologically, we’d go back to Fukuoka for a few days, and then to the next post in this series: Kagoshima, right down at the bottom of Japan’s main island. We’d encounter incredible beef, and even more incredible and unexpected hospitality from two locals.
Footnotes
It’s almost stupid to write this because it seems so obvious. Like, yeah, just look at the stuff you want to, duh? But it’s easy when you’re somewhere you may never visit again to feel like you’ve got to take a stab at consuming everything even a little bit. One takeaway I have from traveling is this do it all impulse is fundamentally misguided, and rears its head at many different scales (e.g., which countries should we visit? which cities?), and must be persistently fought against. ↩︎
