I went to Nagasaki last weekend. I’ve been wanting to go for quite a long time. It’s very ironic how this tiny city is famous, yet big Fukuoka where I live is almost unknown amongst Westerners. No trip, of course, would be complete without a lot of photos. My style of photography is mostly impulsive: I’ll be walking along and as the view ahead captures me, so too I will stop immediately and capture it. I have to walk around everywhere with the lens cap off and the camera switched on, as often there’s only a moment to capture something before people, vehicles or whatnot get in the way, or before someone or something moves from where I want to photograph it. As a result, what you see in my Nagasaki Album is literally all the shots I took (with Yoko’s efforts in a separate album), minus a few really bad shots from the train and photos taken to make panoramas.

I guess the most interesting part of visiting such a historically famous place is wondering what to think. Really the events that occurred 60 years ago are beyond comprehension. Even the museum, which does its best to impress on you the massive heat and blast generated by the atomic bomb cannot really achieve its goal. Even being able to touch the surface of a ceramic tile that was exposed to heat powerful enough to turn its surface from cement to glass, really doesn’t do enough. The pile of bones that are all that’s left of a person close to the hypocenter comes damn close though. People’s flesh was literally vaporised.

However, Nagasaki is more than just the Peace Park and memorials. For centuries it was the city with the most foreign trade in Japan and Japan’s centre of Christianity, with the oldest Christian church in Japan, Oura Church. A number of famous Westerners lived there as well, becoming rich through trade, and leaving their large houses behind as a reminder of what occurred there. One such house is Glover House, named after the Western owner, famous for setting up the first phone line in Japan, demonstrating the first Japanese train, sponsoring the brewery that produced the first Kirin beer and even influencing politics amongst Japanese Samurai rulers.

That’s a lot of history for a relatively tiny Japanese coastal town.