Throwing in the towel

Made the decision today to cut out on my backpacking trip early and head back to Tokyo for more time of rest, relaxation, and shopping... sometime between when I got on the train in Hiroshima and when I got off in Nagasaki in the afternoon, I coughed too hard and pulled a muscle or (hopefully not) injured a rib. It's uncomfortable but nothing life threatening - just hurts when I sneeze, cough hard, or pass the gas. In the interests of not "pushing it" and making the boo-boo worse, I'll be hanging up the backpack and re-routing my itinerary for Tokyo tomorrow afternoon. I'll be skipping Nagoya, Nagano, and Gifu, but those cities can wait for my next trip out here... any takers?

Rode the Shinkansen trains out to Nagasaki today, which took about four hours from Hiroshima. It's been raining all day long, and my mood's been varying with the weather -- so it took awhile once I got to Nagasaki to decide what I wanted to do. Nagasaki is laid out in a long narrow strip along the water, with easy-to-navigate trams running up and down various routes. I opted to see the Dejima, a break from the temples/castles route -- instead, this is the foremost site in Japan for learning about the history of White Folks in this country!

A crude way of putting it but it's more or less true - Nagasaki was, for a long time, the only port open to European trade in Japan, which adopted an isolationist policy for hundreds of years. The Portugese, and then the Dutch, traders were actually "interned" on a tiny island here in Nagasaki, held under guard by the Japanese, who controlled their comings and goings. They weren't allowed to have wives or women here (thus no children -- sound familiar?) and were also required to make periodic trips to Edo (Tokyo) to thank the Japanese shogunate for allowing them to trade in Japan.

Nevertheless, Dejima (the name of the little man-made island of warehouses and homes) operated fairly smoothly and even served as a conduit for Western medicine and mechanical science into Japan. One interesting fact was that Dejima was the only place in the world that flew the Dutch flag after Napoleon took over the Netherlands (guess that news here was slow travelling...) Dejima today is being carefully and quite professionally rebuilt -- the museum exhibits and room re-creations are brand new, some of them having just opened back in March.

Off to stroll around Nagasaki and head back to the hostel!