Colima Presso Nagasaki. Casa giapponese, terrazza e giardmo. In fondo, al basso, la rada, il porto, la citta di Nagasaki. (A hill near Nagasaki. A Japanese house, terrace and garden. In the background, at the bottom of the hill, the roads, harbor and city of Nagasaki.)

THUS BEGINS THE libretto of Giacomo Puccini's world famous opera Madame Butterfly set in Nagasaki. However, until the June 1996 presentation of a life-size statue of Puccini in Glover Garden by an Italian government delegation from the composer's home province of Lucca, few residents of the city thought of the opera in terms of its Italian-Japanese connections. A small relief of Puccini had existed in the Garden since 1963, but it was dwarfed by a statue of Miura Tamaki, the most famous Japanese soprano to perform the role of Cho-Cho San. The fact that the opera was based on a story by the brother of an American missionary stationed in Nagasaki and revolved around the relationship between an American sailor and a Japanese prostitute (falsely rumored to be modeled after the Japanese wife of the Scottish merchant Thomas Glover), evoked images of the United States and Britain, not Italy.

However, just as the harbor and city of Nagasaki served as the background to Madama Butterfly, so too did the Italian presence here provide a significant, if subtle, backdrop to the development of this western Japanese seaport town in the years between Perry's opening of Japan and the outbreak of World War II. For, whatever the story of Madama Butterfly may have been, the words were sung in Italian and the hauntingly beautiful music was the creation of an Italian operatic master. Using “Madama Butterfly” as a metaphor for Italian influence in Nagasaki during the period, one can argue that while the British and Americans dominated the more visible aspects of the Western community here, Italians helped shape the subtle character of the so-called “Western Exoticism” that survives in the city to this day even if this legacy has been unnecessarily altered to satisfy the needs of local tourism.

Prior to World War II, this exotic Italianate aura was captured by the common reference to Nagasaki as the “Naples of Japan” or the “Naples of the Orient.”