Places in Japan- Kyushu's Nagasaki

Kyushu's Nagasaki, made famous in 1945 as the second and final Japanese city to receive an atomic bomb to end World War II is rich in history. As the largest city and capital of Nagasaki Prefecture, it was founded by the Portuguese in the 1500s. It is rumored that the first foreigner of African decent came around this time as a slave/bodyguard of one of the missionaries, not in the mid-1940s which had many African-American soldiers and sailors in occupied Japan.


Missionaries did what missionaries did of this era which was to introduce and convert the locals to Christianity. In the late 1580s, one of Japan's great unifier's, Toyotomi Hideyoshi's plan to unify Japan did not sit well with this outside influence in Southern Japan and as a result Hideyoshi ordered that the missionaries be thrown out of the country. This was not enforced and people in Nagasaki continued with Christianity. This changed in 1603, when another great unifer, Tokugawa Ieyasu took power. Japanese Christians were forced to renounce their religion, all foreigners were thrown out of the country and Japan spent 250 years in isolation, known as Sakoku aka the Edo Era.


Many elements of Japan's "Bible Belt" still exist in today's Japan. In the top picture, a church steeple is in the center with Japanese temples on the right.

I went to Nagasaki in 2005 and was moved by the sight of the ruins left behind from the atomic bombings. My wife reminisced of her time in Nagasaki as a 2nd-year high school student on a school trip from Tokyo and the time she rode the "Blue Train" from Tokyo. She was nine and since the "Blue Train" means "long-haul over night", my wife, her older sister and grandmother traveled to Nagasaki at night.


To get to Nagasaki can be done by ground or air. In '05 we flew from Tokyo's Haneda to Nagasaki, After seeing the sights in Nagasaki, we then traveled to Fukuoka where we met my father-in-law and his family. With my in-laws, we visited the Dutch resort, Huis Ten Bois in nearby Sasebo, the home of the American Navy base. We later returned to Fukuoka to see the sights and flew from Fukuoka Airport back to Haneda.



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