Japan · Nagasaki Prefecture · Nagasaki
Maruyama, Nagasaki — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Maruyama is Nagasaki's old licensed quarter, the Maruyama-machi and Yoriai-machi lanes that begin past the Shianbashi crossing.
About Maruyama
Where to stay in Maruyama
Not every neighbourhood fits every trip — here's what each one is good for.
Beds cluster where the tram runs. The Shianbashi stop on the Nagasaki Electric Tramway leaves guests a few minutes below Maruyama-machi, so rooms along that line put the old quarter, its restaurants and the Hamanomachi arcade within an easy walk after dark. Quieter beds sit up by Maruyama Park, where the stone slope of Maruyama Oranda-zaka climbs out of the lanes.
Yoriai-machi keeps the older frontages. Choose by how late you eat.
About Maruyama
What are the main landmarks in Maruyama?
The quarter keeps its landmarks small. Kagetsu began in 1642 as the Hikitaya house, the foremost address in Maruyama, and the garden teahouse that gave it the Kagetsu name went up in 1818. Umezono Migawari Tenmangū stands a few doors along, its grounds carrying a stone monument to the song Nagasaki Burabura Bushi.
Gyokusen Inari and Naka no Chaya complete the buildings the old quarter left behind. Maruyama Park pins the upper end. Nagasaki Kenban still keeps the geisha register.
What is the history of Maruyama?
Seclusion made this quarter. When the shogunate shut the country, the Dutch factory was moved from Hirado to Dejima in 1641, and the Maruyama name came the same way, carried over from a Maruyama in Hirado. The city gathered its houses onto one site the following year.
Only Maruyama women held the licence to pass the gates of Dejima and the Tōjin Yashiki, which made the two old streets the hinge between foreign trade and the town, and the address changed from Tayū-machi to Maruyama-machi and Yoriai-machi. Ihara Saikaku wrote of what it cost. The anti-prostitution law of 1956 closed the licensed quarter.
Where is Maruyama?
Maruyama occupies rising ground inland of the Nagasaki waterfront, where its two old streets fold into the slope that carries Maruyama Oranda-zaka.
Good for
More areas in Nagasaki
Updated September 2026