Nagasaki

Nagasaki City is not the easiest place to describe. Since the Portugese traders came in around 1570 the place has become quite an international hotbed. There is a cool China town and lots of Christian sites as well as some Mung dynasty architecture. It is on the water and hilly. There is a little river that runs through it. The north part of the city is all modern partly because it was demolished by an atomic bomb little more than 60 years ago.

South Nagasaki, the part of the city that remains intact, is so cool that it is my new favorite place in Japan. (I still haven't been to Kyoto, Kobe, or Nara, so I have some traveling to do.)

Many things have crossed my mind while in that city as well as after. There was the time that Aki and I went to this out-of-the-way restaurant that looked very decent and normal only to find that the family who owned the place may have been both on cocaine and part of the Japanese mafia. We figured this out because of a strange taste in the soup they served and by observing this family for a while. The grandpa was singing karaoke from the TVs behind the bar, but it was more than just singing--it was some sort of trance he was in and I don't know if alcohol could explain it. It was Sunday night, but that doesn't account for the fact that we were alone in there with this one odd family (supposedly the owners of the place), complete with a very peculiar 4-year-old and a grandma who could not really pronounce a full sentence. If the FBI or CIA is reading this then I think I can safely say that we've found one of the major trafficking nodes of southwest Japan. That place was not really a restaurant.

The city was shutting down early that night because it was Sunday and it was getting cold. It was a strange experience to walk down these streets where every little store had already put down its metal door. Whatever happened to nightime window shopping?

The next morning we made it to the atomic bomb memorial sites. First was the museum where relics were displayed, including a clock that had stopped at 11:03 from the heat of the explosion at that exact time 60 years ago. In the museum I realized that the American military had named their atomic bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man." Something is extremely disturbing about the amount of euphemism put into these names.

We walked over to the Peace Park where many statues were displayed as well as a sign telling people to lot let their dogs soil the garden. But before that we stumbled on a park where the epicenter of the bomb had been. There was a circle of places to sit around it and a strange black monolith in the middle. On the side a cross section of a damaged cathedral is standing straight up. It's strange to have this park in a place that has been completely made over. The whole northern city seems to have been completely rebuilt and what the destruction is replaced by are these two or three very pronounced memorials. The eyes of older folks in the tramcars, which settled themselves in a peculiar way on me, seemed to suggest that the tragedy was not well forgotten. One young Japanese man in the museum gave me a less than friendly stare as we passed each other. But I cannot blame him.

See why it's hard to describe? There are so many major aspects of this city, so many details, that they all get jumbled up. It's like a jambalaya or champon soup, only more odd, perhaps as if some ammonia was added to the champon soup. Very intense, slightly discomforting, but still somehow perfectly capable of beauty and joy.