The Former Alt House: Biography of a Nagasaki Landmark

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The former Alt House is preserved today on its original site in Glover Garden, a historic theme park located in the Minamiyamate neighborhood of the former Nagasaki Foreign Settlement. A National Important Cultural Property, the house is the oldest Western-style building of stone construction in Japan. Completed in 1867, it evokes the style of a bungalow in British India, with sandstone walls and a row of Tuscan pillars marching along the front of a wide stone-paved veranda, and all the nostalgic nuances of the elegant if incongruous European colonial presence in East Asia. Yet despite the well-preserved physical condition of the building, the interior suggests that the decorators had scant information about the original position of furniture and ornaments or the function of individual rooms. Similarly, most of the pamphlets and books available on the subject of Glover Garden emphasize architectural features and gloss over stories of the buildings and the people who once lived there. For the first time in any language, the present work introduces former inhabitants and functions of the building and outlines the events that crisscrossed there from the year that Japan awakened from a long slumber and opened its doors to international engagement, until the postwar period when Nagasaki cleared the rubble of wartime destruction and chose tourism as a step to recovery.