Tag: nagasaki

As Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita upon witnessing the first successful test of the world’s first atomic bomb on July 15th 1945, little did he know how true those ancient and earth-shattering words would ring come August of the same year. And it is these words, and Oppenheimer’s sad realisation at his monstrous creation, that have been with me today as I walked the streets of Nagasaki. A sobering and humbling afternoon to put it simply.

 The train ride from Hakata did not prepare me for what I was about to experience. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are casually swept over in history class at school, always presented as the final victory and grand finale of the theatre of the Second World War. The reality is much different. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb museum (原爆資料館) is only a couple of charming streetcar stops away from the station where my hostel is located, and the elegant and to-the-point museum is poignant and brutally blunt. It would have been impossible for me to have been in Kyūshu without coming face to face with the suffering and loss that was experienced here in Nagasaki. I wept for the 75,000 that were vaporised instantly in front of the testimonies of the survivors.

Testimonies of children who buried their mothers, husbands who buried their wives, and sisters who buried their brothers. The inhumanity of such an attack is unspeakable. I can only give credit to the museum for rightfully bringing me (and others) to tears over this act, not to mention over the thousands more who died in the years afterwards.

But it is the resilience of Nagasaki, and of the Japanese people in general, that struck me the most. The will to carry on, to never give up, something that I picked up on vaguely many years ago in David Pilling’s Bending Adversity (read it, it’s incredible). The beautiful peace park that follows the museum, and the sombre memorial to the dead along with the preserved hypocenter (ground zero) along a beautiful little canal, is testament to how much this city is committed to preventing conflict and to moving on upwards from disaster. It’s heartwarming to walk these lively and upbeat streets today knowing that underneath them lay a nuclear wasteland of suffering only 73 years ago. I anticipate to find very much the same thing when I get to Hiroshima in a week.

The will to carry on. That is what I have managed to summarise Nagasaki, Japan’s historical cultural front to the world and a beacon of hope and strength in the south of a once war-ridden country, in one short day. An impression that genuinely made me appreciate sitting in front of my kaisendon on the quayside tonight. 

I pray (using the term loosely) that my generation, my brothers’ generations and those to come never have to experience the horrors of war that I have seen today. I will leave this city tomorrow more grateful for my life and grateful to be living in security than I was before I stepped off the train this morning.

I implore you all – those who are reading this – to go tonight to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb museum’s English site and read for yourselves what you weren’t taught in GCSE history.

“What passing bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifle’s rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall,

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.” 

Wilfred Owen, The War Poems (1917)