Nagasaki, Japan: The other side to Japan's Atomic Bomb City

The approach to Nagasaki is beautiful in the early morning as my Ponant cruise ship L'Austral glides through the silent, silvery-grey water of a bay fringed by forested hills. Humped islands are draped in gossamer mist and seabirds drift. Like a seven-veiled dance, the city is revealed in slow instalments: villas half concealed in trees, bridges, houses tumbling down hillsides.

Then we glide past the Mitsubishi shipyards that made this city a target for American bombing in World War II, and the city is revealed. Locals jog on the promenade and trams rumble along the road. Beyond stand colonial-era buildings that wouldn't look out of place in downtown Melbourne. This subversion of stereotypes is what I enjoy most about travel. Before I've even left the ship's deck, my perception of Nagasaki as just That Atomic Bomb City is already cracking.

"Fat Boy" was dropped on Nagasaki in the late morning of 9 August 1945. It missed the Mitsubishi shipyards by 800 metres, flattened a third of the city and killed 73,884 people outright, injuring as many more. The first stop on our shore excursion is the Atomic Bomb Museum, with its unflinching portrayal of destruction and death. To me, however, it turns out to be far from the most interesting thing about Nagasaki.

What did I expect before I floated into this harbour city? Bombed out ruins and disfigured people, perhaps. Nonsense, of course. Seventy years on, you'd never know Nagasaki was obliterated in an instant. Its ordinariness is almost shocking. The city of 440,000 people thrives on maritime trade, shipbuilding, fish and mostly domestic tourism. Like any other city, its downtown is a jostle of office blocks, department stores, temples and noodle houses. More laid-back and less neon-encrusted than many Japanese cities, Nagasaki has a rather sleepy seaside charm.

Japanese tourists (apart from herds of baffled, fidgeting schoolkids) don't come for the Atomic Bomb Museum but for Nagasaki's air of foreignness. Long before it became notorious, the city was an east-west trading and missionary outpost. The Portuguese came in 1571 but where booted out for their meddlesome Catholicism. Only the Dutch remained after 1639, running the only European trading post in all Japan through its two centuries of seclusion.

Tiny Dejima Island that confined the foreigners is now joined to the mainland by reclamation, and swallowed up into Nagasaki's workaday harbour area. Its restored or re-created Dutch houses are pleasant but bland, providing a desultory poke around old cannon, sundials and telescopes. Japanese tourists have more fun in Huis Ten Bosch, a re-created 17th-century Dutch town complete with royal palaces, windmills and clog-hopping tulip-growers, but it's 65 kilometres out of town.

For those off a cruise ship, better walk across the canal and into Chinatown, that other little historical enclave of allowable foreignness. It still has a lived-in bustle and clutter. Shopkeepers fry octopus under grinning gilt dragons, schoolgirls gorge on steamed buns, and tourists browse for trinkets. The hills above town are dotted with Chinese temples. Kofuku-ji is the most pleasant, with leafy gardens and lazy views, but I like Sofuku-ji, a knobbly orange Zen temple that looks as if it might have been dreamed up by a Chinese Dr Seuss.