Is there more to do in Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
I was in Hiroshima for a day last summer. It’s AWESOME. Clean, safe, a teensy bit seedy, and the atomic memorials are truly shocking, even to the most skeptical of my group. Okinomiyaki was divine, the Hiroshima Carp’s baseball stadium is the best in the nation, and the public transportation is easy. I wished I could have spent more time; I visited a lot of Japan over two weeks, and it was my favorite place. Oh: also, nearby, there’s some island a train and ferry ride away with a monkey-infested shrine at the summit. The tram to the summit was broken the day I went, so I rented a bike and spent two hours carrying the bike up hills and screaming back down. As fun as anything in my life. The local sweets were insanely good.
As you said, Kyushu is much further away from Tokyo; so hardly anybody has travel experiences to relate about Nagasaki. Someday I want to make that trip, all the way to the south island… but I did make it as far as Hiroshima, in 2004, and had a great time. (Photos and more trip info are available at my site; where I made a special page devoted to the Atomic Memorial Museum.) I stayed in a reasonable, convenient hotel obtained on the spot at the tourist counter in the train station (which has several okonomiyaki restaurants in the department store upstairs, if you just can’t wait).
