NAGASAKI

(I was - for a blessedly brief moment - contemplating titling this bit “Nagasaki is da Bomb!” but thought it might be considered in poor taste. Apologies for a very belated posting on my 4-day vacation Oct. 31-Nov. 3, but it’s been a hectic month.)

Oct. 31 SATURDAY

Because of limits on my move date in October, I ended up having to do it the last day of the month, thereby losing half a day of my 4-day break moving into my new apartment in Mikage. A friend from church borrowed their tiny pick-up and managed to fit all of my limited belongings in. Mid-afternoon, I was settled enough to catch the Bullet Train (Shinkansen) southwest to Fukuoka, the capital of the southern island of Kyushu. The ride is fast, yes, but not very scenic: half the time you’re ducking into tunnels in the mountains and rushing past picturesque villages at 150 mph!

I was met at the end station by an old Georgetown classmate who was part of a clique of student friends from the old days, Sumiko Nagasawa, now an almost-retired professor at Kurume University. I don’t think we’d met since I graduated from GU in 1984! We’d gotten news of each other second-hand over the decades from other classmates, but despite that tenuous link, Sumiko insisted on paying for my hotel in Fukuoka the first night and a pricy buffet dinner – Japanese hospitality!

Nov. 1 SUNDAY

Both of us felt we hadn’t finished our catch-up conversation Saturday at dinner, so Sumiko invited me to see her university and have lunch at the local Ishibashi Cultural Center and museum in Kurume Sunday morning. Ishibashi is the original Japanese name for the big tire company family Bridgestone (ishi = stone, bashi = bridge), now a big local patron of the arts. The museum had beautiful grounds with a Japanese garden and a chrysanthemum contest going on (the official flower of the imperial family). It was lovely even in the rain!

Afternoon, I was off on my original plan to get to Nagasaki. I checked into a little more down-market Japanese inn (Ryokan) that had been recommended in a budget guide.

Nov. 2 MONDAY

The Bomb

I figured the most appropriate place to begin a visit to the second A-bomb site city was the Atomic Bomb Museum – actually I walked to the monument at Ground Zero first. A few days after Hiroshima, August 9, 1945, a second mission had targeted Kokura, another city on Kyushu Island, but because of poor visibility headed to target B, Nagasaki. Even there, they almost aborted the mission, but the clouds parted at a fateful moment, the bomb bay doors opened, and Fat Boy did its work. I ended up at Ground Zero at almost exactly the same time as the original bombing - 11:02 am - and looked up at the clouds – today, too, there were openings.
The museum was more thorough in every detail than anyone except a historian could handle. Nagasaki, ironically, was the most historically “open” city to the West in Japanese history and the most Christian in Japan. Not only were Japanese civilians killed in the blast, but US, Korean and other POWs in a camp nearby. The main Catholic cathedral for all of Japan, Urakami Cathedral (since rebuilt), was reduced to bricks and broken statuary, and 8,500-plus Christians died in the blast with another 12,000 wounded or scarred by radiation.

The Victorian Era

Nagasaki was also one of the earliest ports to open to Westerners after Commander Perry’s fleet forced Japan to open to the West in 1859. Many Americans, British and other Europeans arrived to make their fortune, including Glover of Scotland. He married a high-born Japanese wife, had a Japanese-British son to carry on the business, and built a beautiful home - Glover House - overlooking Nagasaki harbor that still can be visited today (in a little Japanese Disneyland-style European Home theme park). His home was the inspiration for Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly. You can easily picture her sitting on the porch of that high-perched Victorian home daily looking at the ships below entering Nagasaki harbor for her American love. (A statue of Butterfly can be seen just outside their garden.)

Dejima Island

Nagasaki’s Chamber of Commerce is keen on fronting its European historical ties, nowhere more so than on tiny Dejima Island, a spit of an island just off the dock of the harbor town that was the only legal location in Japan from 1641-1859 where Europeans were allowed to trade goods and ideas with Japan. In this case, just the Dutch. The Spanish and Portuguese had been expelled by the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa earlier in the 1600s and many Catholic missionaries and Japanese converts martyred. The Dutch were nicknamed “koumo-jin”, or “red-haired people” by the Japanese. (The two Iberian nations were less flatteringly nicknamed “southern barbarians”!)

Dejima over the years has had its seafront filled in and attached to the main city, but a complete restoration of the site is underway, and it will once again become surrounded by water on all sides and its buildings restored. A museum already exists on the location highlighting the European and international goods and ideas imported by the Dutch into Japan and the Japanese goods and ideas exported back to Europe. Hard to believe that the main European language studied, translated, and spoken in Japan for over 200 years was that big global phenomenon – Dutch!

Nov. 3 TUESDAY

Before heading back on the train to Kobe mid-afternoon, I spent the morning at the Nagasaki City Museum absorbed in a 400-anniversary exhibit of the Dutch-Japanese exchange sponsored in part by the Netherlands. Fascinating!