If Kyoto slowed us to a walk following our breakneck pace in Tokyo, Nagasaki brought us to a glorious crawl. It's small. It's walkable. It's by the mountains and the ocean. When you're too lazy to walk anymore, its main form of transportation is a tram line. It's hard to believe this city fell victim to the most powerful bomb ever detonated in wartime. Her streets are quaint and quiet, her hillsides peaceful, her people happy and friendly. I fell in love with Nagasaki almost immediately.
Our hostel, Akari, was, as promised, one of the best I've ever seen. Its owners were incredibly helpful and friendly, its accommodations immaculate, and its location along the river exceptional. It also helped that Nagasaki is small enough to pretty comfortably traverse on foot. We ate the first night at a
hostel-recommended restaurant down the street. Ever the culinary adventurers, Jose and I went for the local specialty, champon, or noodles in seafood stew. I'd have to honestly admit it was probably my least favorite food of the trip so far, save maybe for Jose's cow stomach in Kyoto. The animal parts were varied, sometimes excessively chewy, and often unidentifiable.
We met 4 awesome British/Scottish guys at the hostel and invited them out to a jazz club we wanted to check out. We walked the 10 minutes along the river to the main commercial area of Nagasaki and fairly easily came upon a doorway advertising jazz until 26:00. I'm all about adding extra hours to the day. Anyway, we tromped up the narrow staircase to the 3rd floor and discovered a gem - a spectacular hole-in-the-wall bar packed with CDs, vinyls, memorabilia, and likely the largest liquor collection in Nagasaki. The bar boasted all of 7 seats, perfect for our group of 7. Jose instantly befriended the proprietor, a Mr. Mizaguchi. Mizaguchi-san would serve us a drink from his extensive collection, ensure that our bowls of bar snacks were full, and then accompany one of his own CDs on the saxophone. Jose was smitten, and the rest of us were
instant fans. In the course of conversation, we discovered that Mizaguchi-san had been born in China in October of 1945. His family moved to Nagasaki in May of 1946. The bomb had been dropped just 9 months before. Reluctantly leaving around 12:30 so we could get ourselves up to sightsee the next day, we promised Mr. Mizaguchi we'd be back before we left Nagasaki. Not 8 hours into Nagasaki, we had friends and our own amazing watering hole. We would return 2 nights later, with Mizaguchi playing "Happy Birthday" for Jose on the sax and then digging into his record collection to treat us to a Frank Sinatra vinyl. Simply amazing.
We invited the Brits and Scots out the next day to visit the atomic bomb sites. It was, as
predictable, quite an emotional experience. We first visited the Nagasaki Peace Park, perched on a hill above the suburb of Urakami, ground zero for the explosion of Fat Man. The park is full of peace statues donated from other countries. Its centerpiece is a gigantic Buddha-like
figure, one hand outstretched in a gesture of peace, the other pointing toward the heavens from which the bomb fell. Like so many other things we've seen in Asia, it was massive and impressive. I suppose such grandeur is humanity's attempt at matching the size of the continent.
Our second stop was the reconstruction of Urakami Cathedral. The US did not originally intend to drop the bomb on Nagasaki, but cloud cover prevented the pilots from unleashing Fat Man on their first choice city. Nagasaki was unfortunate enough to finish second (interestingly, chillingly, Kyoto, that grand historic city of 2000 temples, was the final city to be removed from the short list...) The intended target was the Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Factory; a break in the clouds instead brought into focus the Mitsubishi Arms Factory in the northern suburb of Urakami. In yet a final
slip-up, the pilots missed this tertiary target and instead, in a dark twist of irony, hit a Catholic church, Urakami Cathedral. Only the church's front door and surrounding wall remained standing, the saints on either side charred black from the explosion.
Our next two stops were what really hit my gut -
ground zero for the bomb's detonation and the atomic bomb museum. The zero point is marked by a stark black pillar surrounded by concentric lawn circles. It is, in my opinion, an absolutely appropriate memorial. It is flanked on one side by one of the actual front pillars from Urakami Cathedral. I was immediately glued to any building remains actually impacted by the bomb. Even more stark was a simply marked set of stairs leading to "ground level when the atomic bomb exploded". Venturing down the stairs, I found a glassed-in preserved patch of Earth still containing the debris from the day the bomb exploded. It was incredibly eerie. Accompanying the patch of Earth was a stream that had been dammed with dead bodies the day after the bomb exploded. It was surrounded by some of the original flagstone, still exhibiting flash marks from the tremendous heat generated by the bomb (3000-4000 Celsius at the hypocenter). I was speechless, almost reduced to motionless.
The atomic bomb museum ranks right up there with the best museums I've ever seen. It explains every aspect of the explosion, from the build-up to the chemistry behind the bomb, the personal aftermath, rescue efforts, and the state of nuclear proliferation today. It is an impressive nod to human resilience in the face of indescribable disaster. Numerous actual artifacts from the day of the explosion are on display, some attached to mind-numbing, jaw-dropping, heart-wrenching personal stories. Particularly striking are two clocks that literally froze in time at 11:02 am, August 9th, 1945. I was personally thrown by a tin full of carbonized rice, a little girl's lunch that day. She could never have possibly known her lunch would end up a museum exhibit. The lobby of the museum is decorated with thousands upon thousands of paper cranes exhorting the world to peace.
Staring up that day, fixating on the sky above the black column at the hypocenter, I couldn't even come close to imagining the horrors of that day in August, 1945. The sky shone bright blue, scattered with fluffy white clouds, as if nothing had ever been wrong.
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