Ninoshima

This guide to Ninoshima near Hiroshima traces how a quiet island of ferry rides and oyster boats became, almost overnight in 1895, the site of Japan's busiest quarantine gate. It follows soldiers sailing home from the Sino-Japanese War carrying cholera and typhus, a prefecture already losing thousands to the disease, and the engineer Goto Shimpei, given just two months to build a station at the mouth of Ujina Port. Walk this stretch of shoreline, where ships once queued for the steam chambers he built.