Peace in Nagasaki

This weekend we drove to Nagasaki City, about a 90 minute drive from Unzen. I had a seminar for work and we got to stay for two nights. The first day we had free so we got to be tourists. Scott and I hung out with a fellow JET teacher who lives in our town, Alex. He had spent a semester of college in the area so he knew his way around a bit. He’s a recent college grad from Canterbury, England.

We took a tram car from our hotel to the Peace Park. It’s a beautiful memorial park commemorating the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The entrance has a fountain with the water rising in the shape of wings. Among the trees and grass are wonderful symbolic statues of the tragic bombing and the city’s hope for peace.


The most famous is the Peace Statue built by a local sculptor named Seibou Kitamura. It is massive at 10 meters tall (much bigger than I expected from pictures I’ve seen) and dominates the space. It definitely had a powerful presence. One arm rises up to the threat of nuclear warfare and one extends horizontally out to the world as a call for eternal peace. One leg is folded in meditation and one is out poised for action. From my minimal knowledge of Japanese art, this kind of idea of opposites (yin and yang) is typical in sculptures.


We also walked to a park at the hypocenter of the bombing. It felt surreal standing there in such a beautiful park knowing what devastation occurred there. They also had remnants of a cathedral (the Urakami Cathedral) that miraculously survived the blast. At the time of the explosion, two priests there were hearing confessions from several parishioners. All perished but rosaries were recovered from the rubble and this piece (pictured) of the building survived. This cathedral was a symbolic place for Christians in Japan who had been persecuted for hundreds of years. It had just been completed 20 years before the war and parishioners were finally free to practice without persecution.


Next we went to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. A fairly new museum, it was opened in 1996 as part of the 50th anniversary projects for the Nagasaki atomic bombing. It was elegantly designed and everything was respectfully presented and made for a good learning experience. The museum was quite unique and impressive. Aside from information about the bombing, they also had displays related to war and politics. They evenly displayed the wrongs of war from other countries and Japan. They also had a video display from victims of nuclear bomb testing sites from all over the world. Another display I just remembered them having was from American POW survivors in a Nagasaki camp during the bombing. I had never heard these stories before.


Nagasaki emphasizes a call for peace after such a devastating event as opposed to anger or a need for retribution. After seeing pictures of the city in its heyday and then in complete ruin in a matter of minutes, and seeing and hearing the words of survivors, it was definitely heavy and overwhelming. The museum was wonderful though and I got the feeling that if everyone in the world came to visit, maybe there really would be an overwhelming feeling for a need for peace and an end to nuclear warfare.