Tuesday was Depressing Thoughts Day in Nagasaki. It was gray and cloudy as if to match the mood. We started off with the Peace Park, which was tranquil and beautiful in its own—statues and artwork from around the world representing peace, donated to Nagasaki, along with a huge statue and a few shrines. We stopped at a cathedral where a mass was taking place when the bomb went off; the singed rosaries are all that’s left of the congregation. Then we went to the nearby A-Bomb Museum, which was pretty melancholy. We prefer to think of an atomic bomb as a weapon of mass destruction in the abstract, rather than the gruesome details. It’s easier to think of it in terms of the instant destruction it renders than the slow radioactive poisoning that lingers as the legacy of an entire generation. The museum seemed a bit politicized as it was passing out fliers criticizing the recent US withdrawal from treaties like ABM. Curiously though, Pearl Harbor was nowhere mentioned in the museum’s WWII timelines, a somewhat glaring omission in my humble opinion (IMHO).

Outside the museum we walked over to the epicenter, the exact point above which the bomb exploded marked with a simple stone column. Apparently a good meter of soil was thrown into the air by the explosion, leaving the epicenter area flat and depressed. We followed this up by visiting a memorial to the 23 Christians who were crucified in Nagasaki back when Christianity was banned in Japan. By this point we were ready for something that didn’t involve death...