In 2006, our son Rob went to Japan to study at a university in Hiroshima for three months as part of his masters degree research. Later he went back to Japan and Nagasaki for nearly a year at a university there. During his spring break in February – March of 2007, we decided join him and take a tour around the country for a couple of weeks. Since we were not part of a group or any kind of organized travel, we made our arrangements and bravely set out on our own. We flew from Salt Lake to San Francisco and then to Tokyo. From there we flew to Fukuoka. Nagasaki is not a large city with regular airline flights so we had to find the railroad station in Fukuoka and take a train. Needless to say, the whole trip it took a while. But Rob was waiting for us when we arrived and we had a joyful reunion.

Nagasaki had much foreign interaction from historic times with Portuguese and Spanish explorers and was an early missionary and Catholic enclave. The city grew as an important trading center and later as a shipbuilding and industrial center. This made it a major target during WWII for bombing by the U.S. and then a target for the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. We visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum the day after we arrived and the adjacent National Peace Memorial. The museum exhibits artifacts and photographs showing life in Nagasaki before the bomb and the terrible destruction after, it also has an eye-opening exhibit hall showing the history of nuclear arms development around the world.

The nearby Peace Park has a number of memorials surrounding a broad plaza with ruins of walls from buildings that once existed there. The main peace statue is 33 feet tall and at the other end of the plaza is the fountain of peace with sprays that resemble the wings of a dove. Scattered around the park are monuments from a number of countries around the world. As with Hiroshima, it is a place of sobering reflection on the horrors of war and was well worth the visit.

(Top left, my photographs of the peace statue and a small shrine nearby, Bottom left, a marker showing the hypocenter of the atomic explosion and one of the many other peace monuments.)