Glover Garden and Gunkanjima (軍艦島)

Heart-shaped charms at Glover Garden in Nagasaki.

I left the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum subdued and pensive, but there was still much to do on our itinerary, so I shelved my thoughts for later. Erik and I walked over to Nagasaki's Chinatown and munched on the Japanese version of gua bao, then headed up into the hills to tour Glover Garden, a cute little neighborhood of lavish Western-style houses built by merchants and businessmen in the late nineteenth century. The higher we went, the more magnificent the view of the harbor city became. At the top, I took a panorama photo with my cell phone; excuse the lazy stitching job and poor quality, but you can sort of get the idea.

All the hills have Nagasaki reminding me of San Francisco.

Christian martyrs' fountain in Glover Garden, Nagasaki.

The gardens themselves are nice enough to walk around, but what Erik and I noticed the most was the eerie lack of other tourists. Erik blamed the winter and the cold weather; in all other seasons, he said, these gardens were packed with people. This continued to be a theme on our travels. I chose a remarkably low-traffic time of the year to visit Kyushu!

The photo at left is of a fountain that was built to commemorate Christian martyrs in Japan. The history of Christianity in this country is very interesting. It was introduced by Francis Xavier, a Basque Jesuit missionary, when he landed in Kagoshima in 1549. Thanks to early missionary work, northern Kyushu is where "all the churches are" in Japan. But in the 17th century, Christianity was forced underground, and many believers were martyred. Japan opened up to the West again in 1853 at the start of the Meiji period, and in 1871, freedom of religion was restored in the country. Christian communities that had been in hiding for hundreds of years have been slowly growing ever since.

Glover House of Glover Garden in Nagasaki.

A model of the 1.2-meter sundae.

As evening approached, Erik and I met up with a friend of his from the area named Fumi, and we had dinner at an izakaya (居酒屋), which is essentially a pub, but the one we went to was very classy. We had a feast that included sashimi, tempura, delicious grilled meats of some sort, and Japanese beer.

For dessert, we went to a diner called Cafe Olympic, which is famous for... how else can I say it? American-sized portions of everything. You can get a steak as big as your head here. But for our dessert, we ordered a super-tall sundae. The largest ice cream sundae offered at the cafe is a ridiculous 1.2 meters tall. It's a glass as long as your arm filled with four or five different flavors, topped with several more cones and various other random items. I mean, ice cream is ice cream, but you really come here for the novelty of eating your way through a four-foot tower of deliciousness. Fumi said he wanted us to experience a "funny dessert", and sure enough, we had our laughs.

The next morning, Erik and I set out for Gunkanjima (軍艦島), or Battleship Island. Its actual name is Hashima, but when you see it you can easily understand why it was given the militaresque moniker. It took half an hour for our ferry to reach the island; it's not that far out to sea, and from it you can easily see the mainland's coast. From the mainland, though, I don't think it's possible to see this:

Gunkanjima, Battleship Island.

So, yeah, holy cow, what is that? Hashima was a coal mining facility operated by Mitsubishi from 1887 to 1974. The miners and their families lived on the rock itself, having expanded it over the years to become a nearly self-sustained community. At its peak, over five thousand people lived on the island of 0.025 square miles. When Japan began to shift toward petroleum instead of coal, Hashima was abandoned, and it has fallen into extreme disrepair in just forty years.

Ruins on an island in the middle of the sea.

The island used to have dozens of high-rise apartment buildings up to seven stories tall, as well as a large school, a shrine, a hospital, a saltwater swimming pool, and of course, a large mining facility and its offices. Many of these buildings have already crumbled into nothing, but our tour took us around a corner of the island to see what was left. As Erik translated our guides' words, I began to get the picture of a small but lively and tight-knit community that worked extremely hard to make their lives livable. They brought soil in from the mainland and carried it to their rooftops to make rooftop gardens. They faced rough waves from typhoons with nothing protecting them besides the concrete seawall. They made do with very little fresh water and limited electricity. Obviously, the men employed in the mine risked their lives every day to dig coal out from beneath the ocean. But after just a few generations, they left. And all that remains is concrete and brick rubble that the waves continue to erode.

A documentary was screened on the ferry on the way back; I was captivated by the "then and now" photos that were shown: a barbershop busy with customers then, a row of rusting barber chairs now; an alley filled with women and children then, an alley overgrown with weeds and vines now.

Gunkanjima was the inspiration for the island where Javier Bardem's psychopath villain in Skyfall gambles with James Bond for the life of Severine. I remember the scene quite clearly, but Silva's island is much larger and apparently more structurally sound than the real island; it's actually just an elaborate set. I doubt any film can be filmed here now, although, amazingly, you can Google Street View a tour of the island. Anyway, visiting Battleship Island was still a great experience; it definitely stirred a bit of the thirst for haikyo, or urban exploration, in me. I wonder what abandoned marvels I can find in Korea?

First glimpses of Battleship Island.

Remains of the brick wall of the mine office, and a recently constructed lighthouse up on the hill.

Erik and me on the boat by Gunkanjima. It was extremely cold.

After returning from the island and lunch, Erik and I chilled around the shopping area by Nagasaki Station, killed some time at an arcade, and then boarded a train for our next stop: Kumamoto!

Nagasaki (長崎)

On my second day in Japan, Erik and I took a train from Fukuoka to Nagasaki. It was the first of many train rides. That morning, I had a chocolate croissant for breakfast, also the first of many chocolate croissants. There is an extremely popular croissant shop in Fukuoka Station called Il Forgno del Mignon. The croissants are small, chewy, and cheap. I prefer my croissants flaky, but these were still good, and I could eat a dozen, maybe. Anyway, after we arrived in Nagasaki and had okonomiyaki for lunch, our first stop was the Nagasaki Peace Park and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

The peace park was filled with sculptures that symbolized peace, donated from countries around the world. I suspect that the one pictured to the right is actually Japan's own sculpture, since this was the one where offerings of flowers, water, paper cranes, and other artistic items had been left.

It was, fittingly, a calm and peaceful day. Erik remarked how strange it was that there were almost no other tourists; a very quiet Thursday afternoon. Fittingly, the only other tourists we saw were a group of deaf Japanese people.

The centerpiece of the park is the Peace Statue, a giant 10-meter sculpture of a deific male figure who holds one hand pointed up toward the heavens as a gesture of peace and the other pointed toward the site of the atomic bomb's hypocenter. Nearly seventy years ago, the hill on which this park now stands, and the entirety of the city around it, was turned to ash and rubble in the blink of an eye because of war. Today, this giant sits peaceful to remind us never to do such a thing again.

I particularly enjoyed seeing two shrines on either side of the Peace Statue that were filled with thousands of paper cranes in all colors of the rainbow. When I was in ninth grade, Mrs. Johnson taught us John Hersey's Hiroshima and the story of Sadako and the thousand paper cranes. Ever since then, I have entertained the small habit of folding any scrap of paper I have no other use for into a paper crane. My desk will be littered with them by the year's end. I don't know if I've yet folded one thousand, but I'll get there eventually. In the meantime, seeing tens of thousands of cranes at the park (and many more later at the museum) was a nice reminder that tens of thousands of people around the world have been inspired in the same way.

Thousands of cranes at the Nagasaki Peace Park. The Japanese reads "Freedom Nagasaki, we are all one/together".

We then proceeded to visit the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. It is a well-crafted museum with one main exhibit that chronicles the event of the bombing from a comprehensive historical perspective. It begins with a time of events preceding and during the Second World War, explains the mechanics of the bomb and spares no expense depicting its horrific and far-reaching effects, then concludes with a "looking-forward" exhibit that focuses on (seemingly floundering) efforts to curtail the use of weapons of mass destruction internationally ever since the end of the war. I was grounded by the displays: remnants of clothing, photos of charred corpses, twisted steel, bones of a hand fused to a rock, a child's lunchbox with the rice inside reduced to soot. The personal testimonies were also heartbreaking. One that caught my eye was the account of a Korean man present during the attack.

I was surprised to learn that Japanese were not the only victims of the bombings. There were over ten thousand Koreans living in Nagasaki at the time, as well as thousands of Chinese laborers, Taiwanese students, and other foreigners (no Americans, though). According to the account of one Li Ki-Sang, the Korean victims of the bomb were discriminated against by the Japanese, as they were refused medical attention and had no way to get help or return home. He says,

"... There was a sudden, brilliant flash of light. I thought I was about to die. But before I had a chance to throw myself onto the tracks I lost consciousness... [When I later awoke in a primary school-turned-hospital,] I heard cries in Korean coming from the neighboring classroom. When I went into that room I found 50 or 60 of my fellow Koreans lying naked and burned like lumps of flesh and groaning in pain. Then when I shouted, 'What's the matter with all of you?' in Korean, they crawled toward me crying and begging for help. It seems that they were young men brought from Korea by force to work in Japan. They could not speak Japanese. They had been exposed to the atomic bomb explosion while engaged in construction work outside the arms factory... The more I heard from them the more a feeling of anger over the situation and affection for my countrymen welled up inside me."

I, for one, was most surprised that an account like this was even in the museum. (It was translated from Korean into Japanese and English, presumably, but the account itself was not given in Korean in the display.) But it, along with everything else, was an important and sobering reminder that acts of war and violence inevitably have much farther-reaching consequences than anyone can imagine at the time such fatal decisions are made. 11:02am, August 9th, 1945. A break in the clouds, a terrible decision, and generations of fallout.

The Peace Statue in Nagasaki (from behind).