Nagasaki: Day One
So much for “more tomorrow”. Rather than get further and further behind, I’ll jump ahead to the present. Today I left Fukuoka and took the train to Nagasaki (though I think that the ticket counter guy at Hakata station gave me a seat in the green car, for some reason). I arrived and, rather than try to find the information centre that will help make accommodation bookings I decided to use the JR hotel near the station. Alas, the non-smoking rooms are fully booked so I’ve had to take a smoking room (and made liberal use of the air-freshener).
After a bit of a rest up I set out to spend the afternoon at the Nagasaki Peace Park, Atomic Bomb Museum and nearby sights.
While the main focus of the Nagasaki Peace Park is the Fountain of Peace and the Peace Statue, it also includes the “Peace Symbols Zone” with monuments donated by countries all over the world.
I really liked the statues donated by the USSR and P.R. China (below).
Not far away was the Urakami Cathedral, once the largest Catholic Church in Asia, it was destroyed by the bomb. Visitors are restricted (or, at least, I was today) to a metre or two beyond the doors, but the very contemporary stained glass was still quite nice. In spite of the quite different styles of glass and architecture, the preponderance of blue reminded me of the chapel at Buckfast Abbey. Alas, there were signs prohibiting photography.
The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and the adjacent Nagasaki Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims left me feeling, like those in Hiroshima, that these are amongst the most affecting and important museums in the world. The museum has an interesting display which combines a topographical model of the city with a projector mounted above it and a video presentation and voiceover. The projector is used to highlight areas and display effects on the model as they are explained, which I found to be very effective.
The focus of the memorial hall building is, unsurprisingly, the hall itself. It contains 12 “pillars of light” and a large column of shelves which hold the registry of the victims of the atomic bomb.
The Hypocentre Park is directly between the museum and hall and the streetcar station. There are more monuments and a cenotaph marking the hypocentre.
Tomorrow I’ll visit some of the sights related to the history of European contact with Japan, but this evening I’m going to sort through some more of the photos I’ve taken (12GB+ of iPhoto library, currently) and post them to the Flickr set of my Japan trip.
