| Nagasaki |
Though not one of Japan's larger, more economically vibrant cities, Nagasaki has made its place in history, and has done so by sheer accident. The bombers that dropped the second, more powerful atomic bomb in World War II were expecting to drop their load on Kokura in Kitakyushu, a major shipbuilding area and thus a strategically important area to take out to cripple the Japanese military. Unfortunately for the unsuspecting citizens of Nagasaki, it was too cloudy in Kokura to find the target and the planes headed on to their backup target: the cozy little port of, you guessed it, Nagasaki. The name of Nagasaki will unfortunately be a reminder to most of this horrific event, and few will conjure up thoughts of a quaint little port nestled in the hills of western Kyushu, as Nagasaki has now become.
I made two separate trips to Nagasaki, both only for a day. The first trip I took with my homestay sister Makiko because I had two extra train tickets left after a trip to Tokyo and Hokkaidou. We really didn't know what to look for in the city and didn't have much time, so we went to a few random places that turned out to be pretty interesting. My second trip was taken with my homestay family on our way to a nearby Dutch amusement park. This time around I got to see what I really wanted to: the 'Bomb Museum'. It was full of pictures, videos, first-hand accounts, and various other information about the atomic bomb and its aftermath. There were some pretty gruesome artifacts in this place, but it was very educational and really helped me understand the full effect that one bomb had on an entire city, if not an entire country. After making our way through the museum, we walked through the nearby Peace Park and then grabbed some lunch in Nagasaki's impressive Chinatown before leaving. I thoroughly enjoyed both trips to Nagasaki and I definitely think it is one of the prettier cities in Japan, which can partially be contributed to the fact that it has been almost completely rebuilt in the past 50 years.
My pictures of Nagasaki have been broken up according to the trip I took them on, and with the second trip I included my pictures of the Dutch amusement park we went to after briefly visiting Nagasaki: