Friday 21st March

As we neared Nagasaki an early breakfast rewarded us with a wonderful typical Japanese dawn sky, the sort you see in water colours or painted on silk. A grey sea with smudgy dark grey islands in the foreground, lighter grey mountains on the horizon, backlit by a low lying soft orange which gave way to pink and then pale blue. Splashed on to this backdrop were thin wisps of light grey cloud. As we watched, the colours changed from pastel becoming more vibrant until the sun finally emerged as an intensely red molten disc, gradually changing to gold before the increasing intensity of its light finally swept all the colour from the sky. It was a spectacular sunrise.

Now. Nagasaki. What to say without sounding negative. After that curtain raiser of a sunrise we were looking forward to our day in Nagasaki, but the shore landscape was not too promising. Heavy industry was the message it was sending us as we sailed up between the two shorelines, shipbreaking yards, industrial units and shabby warehouse estates were all that we could see. Our trip was to the peace park in the centre of town. Nagasaki is the home of the second nuclear bomb on Japan that effectively ended WWII, but compared to Hiroshima (the site of the first bomb) I felt it didn’t have anywhere near as powerful message. This could have been for any number of reasons. Nagasaki was not the intended target for the bomb, that was covered by cloud on the day of the raid and the pilot had orders that he had to have a visual confirmation before releasing the bomb, so they diverted to the secondary target, Nagasaki. When they arrived it too was covered in cloud and so as the three aircraft were on the point of returning without releasing the bomb, a window opened up in the cloud and they saw Nagasaki through it and took the opportunity to released their Bomb which was intended to destroy the shipyards on the opposite side of the harbour however for whatever reason (no one seems to know why), it exploded over the town about three miles from the shipyards which remained intact. The peace park is quite small and most of the monuments in it are gifts from other countries. As no one knows for sure where the bomb exploded they have marked a position where they think it did. Most of the remains they have on view have been dismantled from their original position and rebuilt near the peace park. So I can understand the difference in feelings between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima was the first city to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon, it was the intended target, the bomb exploded on target, evidenced by photographs and the building right under the exploding bomb remains in its original position as part of the peace park and the peace museum is located within the peace park. Nagasaki by contrast was a standby target. No one is sure where the bomb actually exploded but they know it was over the city and not the dockyards. The peace park is an area close to where they think the bomb exploded and they moved remains to it rather than leaving them in situ. The peace museum is not part of the peace park so it is all rather disjointed and the message they are trying to give is thus a bit diluted. But in fairness one of our table said he preferred Nagasaki as it concentrated on the damage to things rather than to people, as Hiroshima did.

In the afternoon we went to look at old wooden colonial buildings and the first paved streets that were installed by the Dutch in the eighteen hundreds. These are still attracting tourists from all over Japan, even though they do now have paved streets everywhere. Oh and yes I wondered that too. But it looks like the bomb exploded over the nearby hill, thus protecting this part of town.

So there you have it Nagasaki in a nutshell. A decent crowd turned out to wave farewell (as it was only 6.00pm) together with the (by now) obligatory band and for a change, a line-up of pompom bearing cheerleaders. As we did our customary 180° pirouette (I think the captain likes doing them just to show off – wheeee look at meeee). I noticed twinkling all round the harbour and on closer inspection realised that there were crowds lining every available space. All the industrial unit car parks were full of workers taking time off, cameras clicking away like demented Christmas tree lights. We left to many a cheer again and sailed into the East China Sea en route for Korea.

PS after getting turned in at about midnight I had hardly closed my eyes when the cabin lit up as if in a searchlight. Carol was zonked so I got up to see what was happening and not very far away were what looked like a pair of extremely bright headlights pointing straight at us, furthermore there were other identical pairs dotted all over the place. They were so bright I couldn’t identify what on earth they were, so I got the binoculars out to have a closer look as there couldn’t be cars driving around and they were definitely moving so they couldn’t be oil rigs which was my first guess. It was another first for me, I’ve never seen anything like it before but once I’d focussed in on the lights I could see a smallish fishing boat with two booms extended port and starboard. On each boom were suspended about twenty-five extremely bright (blue white) lights with silver reflectors. They were steaming at about ten knots so I guess they were towing some kind of net and not using rods, no idea what fish they were after, but if I find out I’ll let you know.

PPS Just found out they were fishing for squid, apparently the lights attract them up from great depths into the nets they have on the surface.