Nagasaki Shinchi Chinatown

Nagasaki Shinchi Chinatown occupies a compact grid of pedestrian streets in the Shinchimachi district of Nagasaki, in Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in southwestern Japan. It is counted as one of the country's three major Chinatowns alongside Yokohama and Kobe, and it is by some distance the easiest of the three to walk in a single visit, laid out as a simple cross of two intersecting streets.

Each of the four entrances is marked by an ornamental gate built in 1986, and the gates are themed to the four mythical guardian beasts of Chinese cosmology: the phoenix, the white tiger, the turtle, and the blue dragon. Walking in through one and out through another is the natural way to see the district, and it takes only a few minutes without stops.

The name Shinchi means new land, and it is literal. The area was reclaimed ground, built as a warehouse district where Chinese merchants trading with Nagasaki between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were required to store their goods. Nagasaki was Japan's controlled window on foreign trade during that period, and the Chinese presence here was as constant a feature of the port as the Dutch outpost at Dejima.

The district's largest contribution to Japanese food culture came later. Champon, the thick noodle dish in a pale pork and seafood broth that is now served across the country, was created around 1899 at Shikairo, a restaurant near Chinatown founded by its Fujian-born owner, Chen Pingjun, also known in Japan as Chin Heijun. It was conceived as a cheap, filling meal for Chinese students living in Nagasaki. Sara udon, the crisp-noodle variation, came from the same kitchen, and both are on menus throughout the district.

The Nagasaki Lantern Festival, now a city-wide event, grew directly out of the Chinese New Year celebrations held by this community. It was formalized as a Chinatown spring festival from 1987 and expanded across the city from 1994. Dates move each year with the Lunar New Year, generally falling around mid-February and running for roughly fifteen days, and Chinatown remains one of the focal points of the lantern displays.

There is no admission charge and no gate to pass through, since this is an ordinary public shopping street. Individual businesses set their own hours, with restaurants generally open through the daytime and into the evening and shops keeping shorter schedules, so the district feels quite different at lunchtime and after dark. It is worth checking the hours of any specific restaurant you have in mind rather than relying on a single district-wide opening time.

Most visitors spend an hour to an hour and a half here, which is enough for a meal, a walk through all four gates, and a browse of the food and souvenir shops. The Shinchi Chinatown tram stop sits right beside the district and is the interchange between tram lines 1 and 5, so it is one of the easiest places in the city to reach and a convenient point to break up a day of sightseeing.