I made a day trip to Nagasaki to visit the Atomic Bomb Museum.
Even though the museum's sole focus is to preserve the memory of that horrific day it was a place I felt I needed to visit.
It was a scorching hot day, driving over the mountainous region between Fukuoka and Nagasaki we pulled into a rest stop that flanked an inviting river. Running past the ubiquitous vending machines we hurried to the edge of the river, kicked off our shoes and plunged our feet into the rushing water.
Bliss...soon turned to blistering hot as we quickly felt the full force of the afternoon sun beating down on the rocky shore. We scurried back to the air conditioned comfort of our Subaru Imprezza rental, sealed the doors closed and indulged in yet another Pocari Sweat.
It was probably around 40 C but this is nothing compared to the heat experienced 73 years earlier at Nagasaki.
This was my first time visiting Nagasaki and as we pulled up to the museum I felt an unmistakable sense of sorrow. It was subtle, not overwhelming, but it was there. Dark memories, a part of the land that lingered on through the decades and palpable in the streets. Ever present.
The museum itself, or what I thought was the museum, was a square, faded red brick building nestled on a slope near the city center and the Urakami River. As it turned out, the museum was located underground and I never found out what was housed in the brick building exactly, but it certainly added to a feeling of foreboding. Or at least that's how it felt to me at the time. The pictures i found of the building online later seemed much nicer.
I can't say that I know for sure why I was compelled to go there. To be completely honest there was some sort of morbid fascination with death and destruction to be sure but mostly I wanted to understand the event from the Japanese perspective.
There's no escaping the fact that the museum is heavy with horrors, sorrow and despair. Nevertheless, and it sounds crazy to say this, but this was probably my favorite museum I've ever visited.
I found the whole experience endlessly engrossing and moving. We spent nearly 3 hours at the museum but I could have stayed there all day. There's so much to take in at the exhibit that I can only hope to relate a fraction of what I absorbed.
August 9th, 1945
The US Drops an Atomic Bomb on Japan for the 2nd time in 3 days.
Hiroshima was was the first city ever to suffer the catostrophic destruction delivered by a nuclear weapon. On August 6th, 1945, a device name "Little Boy" was dropped over Hiroshima and just 3 days later a more powerful bomb named "Fat Man" detonated over Nagasaki.
Nagasaki wasn't suppose to happen. Although, Nagasaki was on the short list of potential targets for the A-Bomb by the US military, the two cities that were selected were - Hiroshima and Kokura. Three attempts were made at fly overs of Kokura but due to poor visibility and the B-29 bombers being low on fuel Nagasaki was selected as the stand-in secondary target. The Japanese term "Kokura's Luck" was later coined to describe escaping a horrible fate without being aware of the danger.
Originally there were 17 Japanese cities considered for the operation:
Tokyo Bay
Kawasaki
Yokohama
Nogoya
Osaka
Kobe
Kyoto
Kure
Yahata
Hiroshima
Kokura
Shimonoseki
Yamaguchi
Kumamoto
Fukuoka
Nagasaki
Sasebo
Nagasaki - 11:02 AM
Several clocks comemmorate the exact minute the bomb exploded over the unsuspecting city.
Fat Man and Little Boy were secretly prepared and assembled in Tinian Island, part of the Mariana Islands in the South Pacific that includes Guam and Saipan. As part of the Manhaten project the United States had already successfully detonated nuclear prototypes in the desert of New Mexico in what was known as the Trinity tests.
Fat Man was a more complex bomb than Little Boy and the military was eager to see how it would 'perform'. Fat man was designed with a neutron initiator at its core surrounded by plutonium 239. By contrast, Little Boy was a Uranium 235 device armed with a conventional charge and detonator.
By today's standards the bombs that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear minuscule compared to later iterations of nuclear devices such as the Russian Tzar 50,000 Kiloton monster. But when we consider the scale of destruction left by both "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" it is almost impossible to comprehend the catastrophic power of modern nuclear warfare.
In Part II, we'll discuss the human toll and stories from the survivors of Nagasaki. It's one thing to see how a single bomb could almost completely wipe city right off the map but to hear the stories of the survivors and the images captured from the bomb's aftermath is heart-wrenching.
Thanks for Reading.
