Nagasaki, Nagasaki

Every October, a dragon descends the stone steps of Suwa Shrine and moves through the streets of Nagasaki. It has been doing this for four hundred years. The dragon dances came from the Chinese settlement that once occupied the northern quarter of the city. The Portuguese galleons came too — rebuilt each year in timber and lacquer, carried through the crowd on the shoulders of dozens of men, their rigging swaying above the cobblestones. Nagasaki Kunchi is not a reenactment. It is something stranger than that: a city remembering, year after year, that it was never quite like the rest of Japan. The performers are locals — fishermen, merchants, the families who have held these roles for generations. The audience lines the streets and fills the bleachers. And somewhere between the dragon and the galleon, between the shrine and the harbor, you begin to feel it too. You are in Japan. But you are also, unmistakably, in Nagasaki.

Why is a Japanese town this red? Nagasaki's Lantern Festival, held at the Lunar New Year, lights the city with some fifteen thousand Chinese lanterns, bathing the whole town in red light. It began as the local Chinatown's celebration of the Lunar New Year and has grown into a citywide event. Nagasaki was the one town that stayed open to the outside world even during Japan's era of isolation, where Chinese and Dutch cultures mingled with the Japanese. The red of the lanterns, the movement of dragon dances, the Mazu procession, a Chinese scene unfolds in a Japanese port town. Foreign visitors are startled: why is this place so Chinese? The answer lies in history; a town that stayed open made other cultures its own. A town that was never afraid to mix.

The Megane-bashi — the Spectacles Bridge, named for the double arch reflected in the water — was built in 1634 by Chinese monks. The flea market that runs along the Nakashima River nearby deals in the accumulated past of a city that has always been a meeting point: Chinese porcelain, Dutch-influenced copperware, Japanese woodblock prints, the particular mixture of Nagasaki's centuries.

Nagasaki had the only port legally open to foreign trade during Japan's period of isolation — first to the Dutch, then increasingly to others. This singular position shaped everything about the city: its food, its architecture, its festivals, and the things that have accumulated in its attics over four hundred years and now appear, periodically, at the riverside flea market.

The market is small and irregular. What makes it worth finding is not the size but the specificity of what it contains. Old things in a city that knows exactly how old it is, and what that age means. Browsing here is a way of touching Nagasaki's history that the museum cannot quite provide.

Fire reflects in a foreign-touched harbor. Nagasaki was, during Japan's centuries of self-imposed isolation, the single port left open to the outside world—the one window through which Dutch and Chinese and Portuguese ships brought goods, ideas, and faith. It is a city of slopes, of churches, of mixtures, and over its harbor the summer fireworks rise.

The shells launch over the water from the Waterfront Forest park, and because Nagasaki is built into a bowl of hills, the sound echoes back from every side. From the houses climbing the slopes above the harbor, the whole city can watch—a tiered amphitheater of homes looking down on the fire over the sea.

This is a port that always faced outward, that absorbed what came across the water—Dutch learning, Chinese temples, Portuguese sponge cake, Christianity that survived underground for two hundred years. Nagasaki has known sorrow few cities can imagine, and it has known, longer than almost anywhere in Japan, what it means to receive the world. The fireworks open over a harbor that has spent four hundred years saying yes to whatever crossed the sea.