Nagasaki spills down its hills towards the harbour in a way that makes every drive feel like a lesson in gravity, and the Mitsubishi shipyard sits right at the water's edge, a wall of cranes and dry docks that has shaped the city for a century and a half. The Number Three Dry Dock, finished in the early twentieth century, is one of the pieces of Japan's Meiji-era industrial heritage that were added to the World Heritage list in 2015. It is stone-lined, deep and surprisingly beautiful, like a rectangular canyon cut for ships. Mitsubishi took over the yard in the 1880s, and from here came warships and liners that helped turn a closed, feudal country into an industrial power in a startlingly short time.
Industrial history here has a darker side, and Nagasaki is honest about it. The shipyard was a prime target, and the city was hit by the atomic bomb in August 1945, and many of the people who built and repaired the ships in these yards suffered through the war years. The Takashima coal mine, which the ride also visits, was part of the same story, an island whose coal fed the furnaces and whose workers included forced labourers at the time of the war. Visit with that in mind.
Your day carries on from the city to the Sotome region on the north-west coast, where the hillsides are covered in terraces and small hamlets look out over the East China Sea. The Sotome district is famous for the hidden Christian communities, farmers and fishermen who kept their faith alive in secret during more than two centuries of persecution, and for the elegant church built at Shitsu by the French missionary Marc Marie de Rotz in the 1880s. The road out is a good one, mostly the coast route, with views across inlets and a rhythm of gentle bends that give you time to look around.
Within Nagasaki there are fuel stations and convenience stores in plenty, and the city's food is a pleasure: champon noodles, castella sponge cake and the Chinese influence that comes from centuries as Japan's single window on the outside world. Traffic around the harbour is heavy at rush hour, and the trams, narrow lanes and steep hills reward patience. Once you are out on the Sotome coast, stations get fewer, so fill up before you leave the city.