We make it over to Kyushu, a large island to the south west.  We arrived in Nagasaki early Tuesday evening after a long shinkansen journey from Miyajima via Fukuoka in a heavy spring downpour.  It was windy too, and we had to stop every now and then to turn our umbrellas back each time they were blown inside-out.  We were soaked by the time we arrived at our hotel – three nights in a functional, cheap business hotel to balance out the more indulgent accommodation we’ve enjoyed so far.

Both my father and Obachan mentioned an old song, “Yesterday It was Raining In Nagasaki”, as being particularly appropriate.

 

Although we had been enjoying ourselves enormously, all the sightseeing, travelling and rucksack-lugging had worn us out.  With the weather as rotten as it was, with me needing to catch up with my blogging and still full from our anago-meshi in Miyajima, we decided to take it easy the rest of the evening and stay in.  Paul went out for snacks at the local Seven Eleven, I settled down with my laptop and we were asleep nice and early.

 

When we woke up it was still pouring outside.  We boarded one of the kooky little Nagasaki trams and headed up to Matsuyama-machi, where the atomic bomb was dropped on August 9th 1945.  At the epicentre of the explosion, a sober black granite column stands pointing up into the sky, surrounded by beautiful trees and flowers.

 

The weather was dark and grey and Paul and I both fell silent.  Heading into the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb museum, we felt even more solemn.  The museum exhibition is extremely well done; unsentimentally, it explains events factually and displays various objects such as a melted, distorted clock, its hands permanently frozen at 11:02, the moment the bomb exploded just 500 metres above a neighbourhood full of women and children, destroying a large catholic church.  There are eye-witness accounts from bomb survivors, who were children at the time, who suffered terrible injuries and who lost their entire families.  It is certainly not a cheerful exhibit and is deeply disturbing.  Almost a third of the city’s population died, and another third was injured.  The effects of radiation have continued and to this day people suffer from illnesses as a result.  The city itself, once a beautiful harbour town, was almost completely destroyed.

 

The exhibition also has a display outlining the current situation globally with the nuclear arms race but the exhibition ends on a positive note with the work done by the anti-nuclear arms movement and a plea from the people of Nagasaki:  “Please, we ask the world, never to allow such a bomb to be dropped ever again.  Nagasaki should be the last city ever to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb.”

 

We felt somber for the rest of the afternoon.  But we felt it was important to acknowledge this painful part of Nagasaki’s history.  It struck me, over the two and a half days in Nagasaki, how cheerful, friendly and relaxed the people were.  It is extraordinary how rapidly they rebuilt the city; they even continued with their usual annual October festival, just months after the bomb, to keep people’s spirits up.  Nagasaki is an emblem of human resilience.

 

We had cheered up a little by the time we went out to eat in the evening.  We visited Chinatown’s Kairakuen (a recommendation by our friend Michiko-san) for some saraudon (“plate-noodles”) and ton-po-ro, which is slowly stewed belly pork, sandwiched in a dumpling with a sweet sauce.  It was delicious, comforting – good rainy-weather food.

  

 

The influence of Chinese culture is visible everywhere.  Nagasaki is the first natural port of arrival when sailing in from the west and so is the “gateway to Japan”.  Its first contact with the West was with the Portuguese and the Dutch as early as the 16th century, when an off-course Chinese ship blew into port, setting of the start of many fruitful exchanges.

 

The cultural mixture is evident in the food – the Nagasaki specialties are almost all Chinese-based dishes; as is its famous local cake, Castella, a fluffy handmade traditional sweet treat taken from old Portuguese recipes.  We went to buy a small loaf of it from Fukusaya, which, incredibly, has been making Castella since the 17th century.

There is, however, an indigenous specialty, a local fruit called zabon - a delicious giant orange/satsuma/grapefruit whose peel is sugared and eaten as a sweet.  Paul and I enjoyed both the peel and the juice on our visit to the Dutch slopes.

 

Nagasaki, despite its tragic history, is exotically mixed.  I felt its appeal particularly with my own Japanese-Western mixed background and visiting Glover Garden and the Dutch slopes the next day was fascinating.  Glover Garden is the site of a 19th century foreign settlement, an abundantly lush hillside area, crowned by Glover House, where a Scotsman, Thomas Glover, once lived with his Japanese wife and half-Japanese children.  By all accounts he was quite a character, creating a warm environment around him and founding a company, Glover & Co.  He supporting the rebels at the end of the feudal shogunate, and after the Meiji Resotration, brought Western culture and science to Japan.  He lived in Japan until his death in 1911.

 

Glover Garden contains a series of Japanese-western style houses built on a slope in Minami-Yamate.  It is a romantic place with gardens, fountains, waterfalls and wonderful colonial houses with verandahs looking out over the bay.  There were accounts from the wife of one of the 19th century settlers who said she thought that Nagasaki was perhaps one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen.  Wandering along the hillside paths, I could see why, and we both thought of the irony of a beautiful city so eager to exchange culture, ideas and science with the west becoming a target for destruction at the end of the Second World War.

 

Paul and I whiled away a happy afternoon there clambering up and down the slopes, feeding some enormous koi carp with the food provided and gazing down at the famous Mitsubishi shipyard where a new container ship was being built; the sun had come out for us just a little.

We wandered further out and along to the Dutch slopes (“Horanda Zaka”) where we saw more colonial houses and explored some more.  We found an extraordinary temple quite unlike anything I’d ever seen before in Japan – if anyone showed me a picture of Sofukuji and asked me where it was, I would immediately have said China.  Bright red and with gold decorations on the altars hung with Chinese lanterns, this was as far as you could get in contrast from the muted, sober Zen Buddhist temples in Kyoto.  The friendly monk allowed us to look around even though the temple was closed to tourists.  Perched up on the hill, with dusk falling, it was atmospheric and left quite an impression.

  

 

Our evening meal was spent in a trendy izakaya (bar serving tapas-style dishes) where we had our own tiny tatami-floored cubicle.  The food was pretty good, though not a patch on the superlative food we’d had so far, but it was a fun place to eat.  Wandering home a little boozy from the fresh Japanese draft beer, we slept like stones until it was time to get up and head off to the station.

 

 

From Nagasaki we were to head south, to Kagoshima, the city in sight of the great Sakurajima volcano.  We’d be transferring to a local train that would take us up into the hills, to another night in another hot spring ryokan.  We couldn’t wait for another night of soaking in hot springs, eating tasty food, sleeping and relaxing.