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.