Nagasaki Travelogue: Dejima at night and history on the hillsides

Dejima: an evening at the Dutch trading post

Inside a lit room at Dejima, a large dining table stood on tatami mats. Plates and glasses were laid out beneath a chandelier. The patterned walls and ceiling looked quite different from the Japanese rooms I was used to. I was back in Japan, yet something about the room reminded me of life in the Netherlands.

What brought me to Nagasaki was a passage in Ryotaro Shiba’s Oranda Kiko, his account of travelling in the Netherlands.

“If the closed society of Japan were a dark box, Nagasaki was a tiny hole pricked into it with a needle. A faint light entered from outside, and that light was the Netherlands.”

Ryotaro Shiba, Oranda Kiko — translated here from the Japanese

Living in the Netherlands had made me realise how little I knew about my own country. I could not properly explain even the relationship between Japan and the country I now called home. After reading Shiba’s words, I wanted to explore Nagasaki, the port in south-western Japan on the island of Kyushu where those histories met. I came alone in late autumn.

Dejima was not originally built for the Dutch. The artificial island was created in 1636 to house Portuguese residents. After their expulsion, the Dutch trading post moved here from Hirado in 1641. Nagasaki merchants had financed the island’s construction. Behind the familiar description of a gateway to the outside world were local people whose livelihoods depended on trade.

The trading-post staff worked and lived on this small island under restrictions on movement. Japanese interpreters and other workers made that daily life possible. Knowledge did not simply arrive on a ship and spread by itself. People had to translate it and work out what it meant before it could become part of learning in Japan.

Land reclamation has changed Dejima’s surroundings, and the buildings I walked through are reconstructions. The original boundary between island and sea is no longer intact. Even so, the dining table and rooms made it easier to imagine people living in a place I had previously known mainly from history books. I was looking at the Netherlands, now part of my everyday life, from the Japanese side of that relationship.

Nagasaki Harbour: streets shaped by overseas trade

During the day I walked through shopping streets and narrow lanes. I stopped outside old buildings and came out onto roads with trams passing through. There were slopes and steps everywhere, with glimpses of the next street between houses. Gradually I began to understand how the city spread uphill from its harbour.

Nagasaki opened as a port in 1571. Trade with Portuguese ships helped shape the town long before the Dutch trading post moved to Dejima. Chinese ships also came during the Edo period, the era of Tokugawa shogunal rule. In 1689 the Tojin Yashiki was established as a residential compound for Chinese traders. The Dutch connection was only one part of Nagasaki’s history.

Dejima and the Tojin Yashiki were separate places with different origins. Learning about both made it harder to attribute the city’s international character to a single country. People arrived by sea and others made their lives here alongside them. Those relationships help explain the variety I encountered in the streets and food.

By evening a sailing ship was moored in the harbour, with low sunlight stretching across the water. These were the waters just beyond the lanes I had been walking through. Standing on the quayside gave me a clearer sense of the city’s geography than dates or maps alone. Later that evening I would visit Dejima.

Urakami: from the Atomic Bomb Museum to the hypocentre

The following day I went to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. I looked at a damaged clock and displays documenting what had happened to Urakami Cathedral. This was another part of Nagasaki’s history, very different from the trading-post interiors I had visited the night before.

The atomic bomb exploded at 11.02 am on 9 August 1945. The hypocentre is in Urakami, north of the harbour. An event I had learnt about under the single name of Nagasaki had a precise location within the city. After leaving the museum, I wanted to understand the relationship between those places on foot.

I walked from the Atomic Bomb Hypocentre to Peace Park and stopped at the Peace Statue. It was difficult to connect the records of destruction in the museum with the roads and trees in front of me. Visiting both the museum and the site gave me time to consider the bombing as something that happened here, rather than only as an event in the past.

Kameyama Shachu: Ryoma’s work on the hillside

I passed through the red torii gates of Wakamiya Inari Shrine on my way to the Kameyama Shachu Memorial Museum. Each flight of steps changed the view of the houses below. I was moving away from the harbour, yet higher up I could see towards the sea again. I remember Nagasaki through these climbs as much as through its street plan.

Sakamoto Ryoma and his associates founded Kameyama Shachu in 1865. Ryoma was a samurai and political activist involved in the final years of shogunal rule. Supported by Satsuma domain and the local Ozone merchant family, the group traded goods, transported supplies and trained in navigation. It is often described as Japan’s first trading company, though its activities also involved shipping and politics.

Kameyama was the place name, while shachu meant a group of companions. The house they rented had previously been used by people associated with Kameyama pottery. They had moved into a building with a working history of its own. That detail connected Ryoma’s organisation with an older trade in the neighbourhood.

The group also dealt in firearms through Glover & Co. and arranged arms purchases for the domains, the territories ruled by feudal lords. Satsuma and Choshu were two such domains whose alliance helped bring an end to Tokugawa rule. Behind the name of that alliance were practical questions: who could buy weapons, under whose name and who would transport them? These were aspects I had missed when learning the political outline. Nagasaki’s port and merchants made it a useful base for this work.

The museum occupies a Japanese house restored to resemble its former appearance. Its displays include copies of letters and replica boots, distinct from the large Ryoma’s Boots statue outside nearby. I had come because of a famous name, but the rooms and objects directed my attention towards the everyday work behind the political events.

I climbed further to Kazagashira Park and looked across the city beyond the statue of Ryoma. This is not the same view he would have seen. Walking between the harbour area and these hillside sites did, however, give me a better sense of their distance and setting. Nagasaki’s history began to involve more people and more kinds of work than the story of one celebrated figure.

Minamiyamate: Oura Cathedral and houses above the harbour

In the afternoon I headed to Minamiyamate. I climbed Dutch Slope and looked up at the white front of Oura Cathedral, then continued to Glover Garden past stone walls and trees.

Oura Cathedral was dedicated in 1865. That year Christians from Urakami who had preserved their faith during the ban on Christianity came here, in the encounter known as the “Discovery of the Hidden Christians”. A church built for foreign residents became a meeting place with Japanese believers whose communities had continued without an open church. Overseas trade and the history of religious belief followed different courses.

At Glover Garden I walked through the grounds and inside the buildings. I could see the harbour between the veranda pillars, and furniture filled the rooms. These were homes associated with the foreign settlement after Nagasaki became a treaty port, a later setting than the reconstructed dining room at Dejima.

The Former Glover House was built in 1863 for a Scottish merchant. It combines Japanese building techniques with features of Western domestic architecture. Visiting after Dejima helped me picture how foreign residents’ lives had expanded beyond a restricted island trading post to houses on the slopes overlooking the harbour.

From here I could look down towards the waterfront I had visited on the first day. As I walked between the buildings, I kept returning to the view of the sea.

Takada Saketen: meeting a couple from Siebold’s hometown

That evening I met a German couple while drinking at Takada Saketen. When I asked what had brought them to Nagasaki, they explained that they wanted to visit places associated with Philipp Franz von Siebold, a German physician from their hometown. That town was Würzburg.

I had come to Nagasaki because living in the Netherlands had made me want to know more about Japan. They had travelled from their own town in Germany. We had arrived with different interests, but Siebold gave us something to talk about.

I knew Siebold as a physician at the Dutch trading post. To this couple he was also someone from home. Hearing that local perspective made me curious about Würzburg, a town I had not known before. I wanted to visit it myself.

The woman running the shop also had a recommendation for the following day. She strongly urged me to visit the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum. Conversations over drinks had added places to the trip that I might not have chosen from my own research.

Koei-ji Temple: yellow ginkgo leaves and a young scholar

The next day I walked along the Nakashima River. The two arches of Megane Bridge, also known as Spectacles Bridge, were reflected in the water, with the city’s buildings beyond. I had seen the bridge at night too. In daylight I could make out the colour of the stone and the riverside trees.

At Koei-ji Temple, a large ginkgo tree had turned yellow. Leaves covered the branches above me and the ground below. It was so beautiful that I kept photographing the same tree, including its trunk in one view and looking through the gate in another.

Fukuzawa Yukichi stayed here as a young man while studying in Nagasaki. He later became an influential writer and educator and founded the school that developed into Keio University. Those later achievements were what I usually associated with him. Here I found myself thinking about the younger person still learning, before he became a familiar historical figure.

Nagasaki’s history involved both the knowledge that arrived through Dejima and the people who came to study it. That led me to look beyond the trading post itself. At this temple, though, it was the ginkgo that first made me stop. I learnt about the connection with Fukuzawa afterwards.

Siebold Memorial Museum: a physician and his family in Narutaki

From Koei-ji I continued to Narutaki and the Siebold Memorial Museum. Near its red-brick building is the site of Siebold’s former home. The night before I had heard about his hometown from the German couple. Now I was visiting the part of Nagasaki where he had lived.

Siebold arrived in Japan in 1823 and opened his Narutaki school the following year. Recognised for his medical skills, he was permitted to practise outside Dejima and taught doctors who came from across Japan. His students also helped him study Japanese nature and society. Describing him only as someone who brought Western knowledge to Japan leaves out what he learnt from the people around him.

His Japanese partner was Kusumoto Taki, a woman from Nagasaki. The hydrangea name “Otaksa” is said to derive from a familiar form of her name. That botanical connection brought his family life into a story I had largely associated with medicine and scientific collecting.

Their daughter Ine was born in 1827 and was still very young when her father was expelled from Japan in 1829. She studied medicine with his former pupils and developed her own career as a physician. Later she served the Imperial Household Ministry and attended an imperial birth. I wanted to understand the years she spent learning medicine in her own right, beyond her relationship to her famous father.

The Siebold Incident concerned maps of Japan and other items whose export was prohibited. His research had come up against restrictions on information controlled by the authorities. Nagasaki offered opportunities to exchange knowledge, but there were limits to what could be shared or taken away. Both were part of his life here.

He was able to return in 1859, thirty years after leaving Japan. The daughter he had left as a small child was now an adult. Thinking about that interval through Taki and Ine made the gap between the dates more tangible. It was this family history, alongside his medical and scientific work, that stayed with me after the visit.

Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum: a recommendation that took me to Nishizaka

Later I went to the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum on Nishizaka Hill. I might not have made it here without the recommendation at Takada Saketen. Outside stood the relief depicting the twenty-six martyrs. After Oura Cathedral, this was another place to learn about Christianity in Nagasaki.

On 5 February 1597, twenty-six people were executed here on the orders of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan’s ruler at the time. They had been arrested in Kyoto and Osaka and marched to Nagasaki. The group included Japanese believers as well as foreign missionaries. The history concerned people who adopted the faith in Japan as well as those who brought it from overseas.

The twenty-six were canonised in 1862, more than two centuries after their deaths. Oura Cathedral, which I had visited earlier, was dedicated to them. Realising that the two sites commemorated the same people gave me more context for the church I had seen on the hillside.

The museum opened in 1962, the centenary of their canonisation. Inside I looked at religious images and objects. The exhibits added a history I could not have understood from Dejima’s trade alone. People and goods could arrive from abroad while the practice of their religion faced persecution.

One small figure took the form of Miroku, the Buddhist bodhisattva Maitreya. According to its label, hidden Christians had worshipped it as an image of Christ. The object belonged to a later history of communities maintaining their faith under the ban, distinct from the execution of the twenty-six. Its appearance alone would not have told me how it had been used.

I had come to Nagasaki interested in its Dutch connections. Here I was reminded that trade continued while religious belief was restricted. That history belongs alongside the busy port and the attractive foreign-settlement houses. Following the shop owner’s advice had given me another part of the city to think about.

At Takada Saketen I had been encouraged to visit both this museum and Würzburg. One became a stop the next day; the other would be part of a later trip to Germany. Both began with conversations in a shop in a city I was only just getting to know.