The Peace Memorial Complex
No visit to Nagasaki would be complete without seeing the buildings
and memorials around the epicenter where the atomic bomb struck in 1945. What follows are a series of
impressions that hopefully give you a sense of what this place is:
Words
from the Peace Statue’s sculptor, Seibo Kitamura, 1955: After experiencing that nightmarish
war, that blood-curdling carnage, that unendurable horror, who could walk away
without praying for peace? This
statue… standing ten meters tall… the right hand points to the atomic bomb, the
left hand points to peace, and the face prays deeply for the victims of
war. Transcending the barriers of
race and evoking the qualities of both Buddha and God, it is a symbol of the
greatest determination ever known in the history of Nagasaki and of the highest
hope of all mankind.”
The
Fountain of Peace description: “When
the atomic bomb exploded on August 9, 1945, thousands of people suffered
terrible burns and died begging for water…. This fountain is ... an offering of water to the
victims of the atomic bomb and a prayer for the repose of their souls…. [It] sends up a sparkling spray
of water in the shape of a pair of wings, evoking the dove of peace and the
crane after which Nagasaki harbor has been named….
The
Peace Memorial Hall, designed by Akira Kurkyu, has two glass walls extending
from a pool of water. Actually the
walls shoot up from the subterranean museum below, where they lead to a tall,
thin cabinet filled with the names of those who died.
Nagasaki’s Lantern Festival
Serendipity pays, especially when you can’t read much
Kanji. Saturday I was walking
around town, visiting some temples, when I decided to wander down a pedestrian
side street. Ahead I saw a crowd
stopped at an intersection: people with cameras, waiting patiently, a few friendly
policemen milling about. And then
I saw what they were waiting for – a parade! Accompanied by drums and cymbals, groups of men, women, and
children walked by, each in brightly colored robes. Interspersed were small ark-like palanquins with bright
paper figures and one with a live, beautiful woman, apparently the “queen” of
the parade. Fun!
And there was more.
I walked down to see Spectacles Bridge, so named because, reflected in
the water below, the bridge looked like a pair of glasses. The area was full of people, lanterns
draped row after row over the river, and giant paper figures all along the
riverside. Then I read the signs
saying, in English, “Lantern Festival”.
There had been a brochure about it in my room, but of course I had no
idea what it said. This was Nagasaki’s
annual celebration of the Chinese New Year and its Chinese population. The festival had been going on for
almost two weeks and this was its last weekend. Now I understood why there were paper lanterns draped all
over town!
Further along, in a lantern-festooned shopping arcade, vendors were making different food specialties. One made a “pancake sandwich”: two small pancake-like rounds, some
filling and sauce, then sealed together: delicious! Another was making what I will call a “fish sandwich”. Here the molds were of fish, not
rounds. As the batter cooked in
one row of fish-shaped forms, the vendor plopped some chocolate or vanilla
cream on top. Then he spread a bit
of batter on the next row of fish forms, flipped this over the first row and
“voila!” a “fish sandwich”. They
were very popular.
Today I decided to wander through Nagasaki’s Chinatown, an
area I hadn’t been to before. As I
walked down the hill, looking at Confucian shrines and strolling down narrow
pedestrian-only residential streets, I discovered a square with a bright red
roof over the top, loud speakers blaring, and a crowd. Inside a show was going on: women holding 5 or 6 sticks in each
hand, plates spinning on top, doing acrobatics. Another man balanced himself on round “cans”, and a third
trio did amazing and beautiful contortions. All around were more paper sculptures, which at night would
light up like lanterns. It was all
quite special.
The Other:
Isolate and Embrace
I was first struck by the diversity of Nagasaki, and as I
toured the city I learned more of the breadth and complexity of its different
populations. The first westerners
here were the Dutch, who were confined to a several-block long man-made island
just off the Nagasaki coast. I
suspect many Japanese felt that such strange-looking people were best kept at a
distance, though ultimately that wasn’t possible.
Today I visited the 26 Martyrs Memorial and its nearby
museum. These were Catholic martyrs,
twenty Japanese (three of them teen-age boys) and six foreigners, killed on
February 5,1597. Ten years
earlier, Hideyoshi, a warrior who unified the political factions in Japan, had banned
Christians, in part because he felt they might obstruct his push for absolute
rule. It wasn’t until 1597,
though, that he decided to enforce the ban to warn Japanese not to convert to
Christianity. Hence the killings,
which were commemorated this weekend in an outdoor mass.
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| 26 Martyrs Memorial |
Later today, I walked through the Chinese quarter,
discovering the “after-party” to the Lantern Festival I described above. There I found signs pointing to a moat that
surrounded the old Chinatown, isolating the Chinese. The Tokugawa shogun had the moat constructed in 1689 as a
“national isolation measure”.
These long-ago instances of separating the “other” from
native Japanese reflect a part of Japan’s culture and helped me understand its different
phonetic alphabet for any foreign (non-Japanese) word. At the same time, I was reminded that
what happened in Nagasaki is what we humans do in countless ways to protect
ourselves from those we perceive as different: we put the Indians on reservations, segregate our schools,
ban homosexuals from serving in the military, set up gated communities so we can be with “people like us”, etc.
In the end, though, we all come to tolerate, sometimes embrace, and even
to celebrate the contributions, humanity and vitality the “other” brings. There’s just a lot of pain and loss
between isolating and embracing.
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