Nagasaki

28^th March 2012 

                                                              Sunrise off Nagasaki

We sailed overnight to Nagasaki, the first of our ports in Japan, arriving on time at 7am, docking at Matsugae Wharf. It is cool, but fine and pleasant enough to get around in a T Shirt. Immigration formalities are a bit arduous as each passenger has to clear immigration individually, including fingerprint scans.

                                                      Sea Princess at her berth

A hour or so after we berthed, another smaller cruise ship arrived , the “Athena” and berthed a bit further into the harbor at the Dejima Wharf.

                                                       Athena at Dejima Wharf

We waited till a lot of the tour groups went ashore and had cleared the whole process ourselves by around 9am, setting out to explore Nagasaki on our own. The first challenge was to get some Yen, which we were told by the tourist information officials we could extract from ATM machines in nearby convenience stores. No such luck, they wanted nothing to do with foreign cards, so it was a quick walk back to the port to change some AUD cash for Yen at less than attractive exchange rates.

Our first destination was Glover Garden, located in the old foreign settlement area, and named after Scots merchant, Thomas Glover. Within the gardens were many of the residences of Glover and other foreigner merchants of the era, including Glover House (built in 1863) which is the oldest example of Western Architecture in Japan. Nagasaki was a major trading port, and had strong trading links with Shanghai.

The gardens are located high up overlooking the port, and both the buildings and the gardens are well worth the visit.

On our way to the gardens we passed another historic building, Oura Catholic Church,  a wooden Gothic church  built by French missionaries in 1864.

Oura Catholic Church

From the gardens we ventured back down the hill, and  into the streets around the port area looking for a tram station. The trams (they call the streetcars), have an impressive network around Nagasaki, and you can travel anywhere for 120 yen (approx A$1.50) one way. We eventually boarded a tram at Dejima station, and headed off to see the Atomic Bomb Museum and Peace Park complex, which is a little way out of the main town area, and is the site where the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki in WW2. On our tram ride, we spoke to some other Aussies on board, who it turned out came in on the Athena which sailed out of Fremantle and was doing a similar cruise to ours, but in the reverse direction.

Steertcars

The “Hypercentre” of the blast, is now just a large park area, with a monument at the location of the centre and a viewing area showing the original ground level prior to the blast. From there we wandered off to the Atomic bomb museum, which is very well put  together and provides a quite balanced view of the events leading up to and after the bomb was dropped. There is also a life size modal of the bomb “Fat Boy" that was dropped on Nagasaki, it is considerably larger than I had expected. There are also some quite confronting accounts of the period immediately after the blast from victims.

Monument at the Hypercentre

Life size model of "Fat Boy"

Atomic Bomb museum

Next we went to the Peace Park which is larger elevated park area about 500m away. It has the famous peace statue at one end, and many other pieces of sculpture dedicated  to promotion of peace.

Peace Park

By now it was lunch time, and we decided to head back to the Dejima Wharf Area for lunch, so simply caught a tram back to the Dejima station. It is only a short walk back to the harbour front from there.  We saw the Athena, berthed at the cruise terminal, and wandered along the waterfront to find a restaurant for lunch. We sat down at a Japanese restaurant that had just served some other diners a great looking tempura meal, only to be told the kitchen was closed. This was at about 1.40pm !!!

Anyway, our second choice was a Chinese Restaurant , the “Red Lantern”, which served one of the best seafood noodle soups I have ever had, so we were quite happy with the outcome.

Dejima Wharf Precinct

After lunch, walked to a huge shopping centre, “You Me Saito” and found an ATM that would take foreign cards, but would only allow me to withdraw 10,000 yen. I guess I’ll have another go in Osaka.

On the way back to the ship, we still had an hour or so of spare time, so decided to explore the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Museum, not far from the ship. It was the site of what must have been a very busy bank when trade was vigorous, and had very strong links with Shanghai. Many of the exhibits were related to this trade route.

HSBC Museum

It was then back to the ship, with a short break in the terminal to see if I could get access to the free wifi there. Getting access took a while, but it was so slow that you couldn’t do anything other than recover your email (very slowly), so blog updates had to wait.

Back on board at 5pm, we were treated to a dance performance by local school children in the Princess Theatre. It was terrific !

There was also a gift exchange with the local mayor, as Princesss Cruises has a special relationship with Nagasaki, having built two of it’s latest large ships (including the Diamond Princess), at the Nagasaki shipyards. Our current captain spent some time here commissioning the Diamond Princess.

After all of the ceremony everyone headed back upstairs to be greeted by very loud drums from the dockside. For the next hour, we were entertained by groups of traditional drummers and musicians, who had set up on the dockside to farewell Sea Princess. A large gathering of locals also thought it was pretty special.

We cast off at 6pm.

We thoroughly enjoyed Nagasaki, and friendliness of the people. The lasting impression we leave with, it how much the nuclear blast changed their lives forever, and the overwhelming message everywhere is for World Peace.