Nagasaki and Fukuoka want more visitors as Japan's tourist crowds grow

Australia-based InsideJapan is steering travellers beyond Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka to Nagasaki and Fukuoka. Both Kyushu cities once served as Japan's foreign gateways, but now they receive far fewer visitors than the country's main tourist hubs. Nagasaki now hosts only about one per cent of Japan's annual 42 million foreign tourists, yet this former gateway city wants more visitors. Australia-based travel company InsideJapan has created itineraries in five Japanese prefectures, including Nagasaki, to spread the visitor load beyond the crowded golden triangle. The imbalance is stark: nearly 50 per cent of visitors to Japan go to Tokyo, 43 per cent to Osaka and 32 per cent to Kyoto. Nagasaki, once Japan's only official contact point with the outside world, is now among the least visited Japanese hubs. For hundreds of years, the only foreigners in Japan were in Nagasaki. During the isolationist Edo era, from 1600 to 1868, Dejima, an island connected by footbridge to the mainland, was the only place where Portuguese and later Dutch traders were permitted to land. Step off the island and you would be captured and executed; stay on it and you could meet Japanese officials and trade. Nagasaki sits in Kyushu, the southern island of Japan. Cruise ships occasionally pour visitors through the main attractions, but for most of the year this port feels like the Japan of 20 years ago, with few foreign faces and little dedicated tourist infrastructure. It is a city that the country's tourist boom has largely passed by. Worldwide, Nagasaki is best known for August 9 1945, when the United States dropped a nuclear bomb that killed 35,000 people. It remains one of only two cities in the world to suffer such a fate. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum is many visitors' first stop, a powerful exhibition of survivor stories and twisted metal fragments from destroyed factories and bridges. Not all of Nagasaki's past is confronting. Quiet streets contain temples, cafes, gardens and shopping malls, a blend of cultures that locals call wakaran, from 'wa' for Japan, 'ka' for China and 'ran' for the Netherlands. The city has long welcomed outsiders, taken their influences and turned them into something distinctly its own. Nagasaki is the birthplace of yoshoku cuisine, Western food remade in Japanese style, and its signature dish is toruko rice, or Turkey rice, so named because Turkey sits between Asia and Europe just as the dish does. The plate stacks rice pilaf, pork katsu and mild curry sauce, with a side of spaghetti in ketchup-heavy Neapolitan sauce. At a bar, an Italian tourist named Giovanni gave his verdict on the spaghetti: 'You know, it's not as bad as I thought. ' Nagasaki's other specialty is champon, a vegetable-heavy noodle soup with strong Chinese roots. I tried it at Kanro, a no-frills diner with high-backed wooden chairs, doily-style tablecloths and a television showing Japanese soap operas. Tokyo has many things, but it doesn't have Kanro. The historic island of Dejima still stands, though reclaimed land has surrounded it. It has been preserved as it was, a cramped collection of warehouses and living quarters that once housed Portuguese and Dutch traders. From Nagasaki I headed north to Fukuoka, another Kyushu port with a long history of welcoming visitors but little of the tourist crush found in central Japan. Fukuoka has a relaxed, friendly style, fewer signs in English, fewer foreign faces in the crowds and an appetite for big, bold food. On my first night, a local guide ordered gomasaba, raw mackerel fillets coated in a thick soy and sesame sauce, and motsunabe, a hotpot made with beef intestines. The guide passed on yobuko ikizukuri, a famous local dish of raw squid so fresh it should still be twitching. Fukuoka's most widely loved dish is tonkotsu ramen, the pork-bone broth ramen known around the world, served with thin noodles and slices of chashu pork. At the city's celebrated shop Hakata Issou, I found a queue at least 50 people long.