Remembering

I went to the Nagasaki atomic bomb museum and the memorial peace hall this morning. The bomb museum begins with a mangled broken clock that stopped at 11.02, the time the bomb exploded. You then walk into a room that depicts the city Nagasaki was before the bomb while a clock ticks loudly, as a countdown to destruction and reminding you that everything you are looking at was destroyed in a second. It's very powerful.

My blip is the memorial peace hall. The columns line up so from this viewpoint you are looking directly towards the centre point of the explosion a couple of hundred meters away. The shelves contain 174 volumes listing the names of more than 172,000 people who died as a result of the explosion and its aftermath.

By the time I got to the monument directly below where the bomb exploded and the peace park surrounding it, it was pouring rain.

This evening I went with some people from the hostel on the cable car to the viewpoint above the city. The extra shows how Nagasaki has recovered from the devastation of the bomb.