First thoughts: Place looks damned good for somewhere we nuked. Modern buildings, no real trash, just a clean modern small city.
Second thoughts: Pretty much the same until we get out of the city, where some of the more rural properties look like you'd expect from the rural south in the US. Kinda kills the view of the Japanese as perfectionists.
Tour: F, a good hard solid F. First, the tour guide actually managed to walk us past the first tour site before taking us back, which was the "samurai village", which was nothing but a few huts along a stream. They might have been interesting if we were told anything about them, but ultimately we took off our shoes to walk on some tatami mats without any information. For the record, those fuckers are like walking on gravel. The stream was far more interesting.
Thankfully we then stopped for lunch at a nearby hotel (a stunning example of a hotel not equaling shit). This was the high point of the entire tour, with soup, sushi, pickled stuff, and a rather large number of other tasty stuff I couldn't identify. I wish this had been the entire tour.
We then went to Shimabara "castle", which had once been a castle, then destroyed, and rebuilt in the 60's as a tourist trap. Nice big pile of concrete with a tourist shop attached. The world would be well served by bombing it back in to a pile of rubble.
The tour guide was moderately tolerable despite being incompetent until the trip back where she felt the need to tell us her life story complete with multiple aggrandizement. Really lady, we don't give a shit. The D just dropped to an F.
Food: I didn't actually get to try anything outside the tour, but that was excellent.
Would I go back: No, nothing of interest that I saw. Unless we nuke the place again I'd rate this about a 0/10 on the interest scale.
Chance of getting mugged: Hard to say, didn't see anything sketchy, but I saw about 5 minutes of city.
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