Nagasaki is a port city on the island of Kyushu and the capital of Nagasaki Prefecture. Since the city was one of Japan's closest port cities to the Asian mainland, Nagasaki has played a prominent role in foreign trade relations for many centuries and was the most important of only a very few ports open to foreign traders during Japan's period of isolation. In more recent history, Nagasaki became the second city after Hiroshima to be destroyed by an atomic bomb.