Nagasaki’s Districts

Abstract

Nagasaki’s cityscape reveals a history beyond the 1945 atomic bombing. Four main area “districts” were focal points for Japan’s contact with the West spanning four hundred years: (1) the Urakami District, Japan’s most significant location for Christians before Tokugawa Shogunate suppression in 1614, and in 1945 the atomic bomb’s hypocenter; (2) the Commercial District during the Edo era, extending from Dejima’s Dutch trading enclave to the Nakashima River and the concentration of Japanese merchants ; (3) the Foreign Settlement District further south along the harbor during Meiji and Taisho, which was British dominated; and (4) the Shipyard District, across from the harbor from the main city, where the Nagasaki Shipyard was established during Meiji and that Mitsubishi expanded into East Asia’s largest shipyard by World War II. Nagasaki represents in microcosm Japan’s changing position in the world: initial contact with European colonial empires, then seclusion from the West, opening the country to modernization, and finally a militarist-industrial empire defeated in World War II but surviving the postwar era.