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.