After seeing Oura Catholic Church, the old Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank Nagasaki Branch building, and Dejima, I headed up to the Atomic Bomb Museum.
One would expect some sort of logic, when traveling a few of kilometers: take the bus or tram. I didn’t! I walked the roughly 3 km (about 1.6-ish miles) through almost 100-degree heat, with sub-tropic humidity. I got to see Nagasaki fairly well that way and I think I like 10 pounds on that walk alone! (I’m actually not sure, I haven’t weighed myself since Tokyo, on July 27th)
The hot walk was in deep contrast to the cold child I received when I saw the Atomic Bomb Museum. I know I was walking in almost 100-degree heat and probably moved into an environment that was 25 or so degrees cooler, but it felt like it was much colder than that as I was viewing the museum.
I have seen some of the footage that was looping around the museum, from TV programs and an old film I saw in high school, and it was pretty grotesque. What I hadn’t seen before was the pictures of people who were turned into very charred corpses in an instant, or the bloody uniforms of workers and of soldiers who were peppered with small pieces of glass that hit them at high speed, after the glass was broken and forced through the air by the blast. As I looked at all of that, I felt sick and cold, which I think was a far worse form of embarrassment that I have ever experienced.
The museum put most of the shocking history of the blast at the very front and as I walked through the rest of the museum, it gave an overview of events from before World War I and through World War II. It doesn’t discuss the role that Japan had during World War II, but that wasn’t the scope of the museum, I think. The museum was, from what I can understand, for showing the horrors of atomic weaponry. Since there hasn’t been nuclear bomb used in battle since Nagasaki (as far as I know), I think that it makes sense the museum would try to explain why using nuclear weaponry should be illegal.
There are no pictures for this post; I didn’t think to take any while in the museum. It wasn’t until after I left that I realized none were taken and going back didn’t feel like an option, this time.
Nagasaki has become a bustling town. If someone didn’t know there was a nuclear blast there, and didn’t see the signs about the museum or Peace Park, they wouldn’t have any inkling of an idea that it had happened. A strong city, Nagasaki has become. And strangely liberal too, compared to the rest of Japan. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like Boulder, Colorado, but I think that the comparison wouldn’t be completely incorrect.
There were many things that I didn’t do while I was in Nagasaki and I will need to go back to experience them. Compared to Tokyo, it does move at a slower pace: one that is strong and deliberate.
