Kagoshima

Today we visited Kagoshima and Chiran.

At Chiran we first visited a couple of streets where the Samurai used to live. Their gardens and residences are still intact after all these years. Many of the residences are lived in by people who lease them with the requirement that people can visit. 

In some of them you can view the inside as well as the garden. 

They have two entrances, one for the owner and his oldest son, and the other for everyone else. The owner and his son live in rooms that are elevated compared to the other rooms in the house, and they have the bulk of the rooms inside the house, with the rest of the family cramped into the kitchen/living space.

Like in Shimo-koshiki, the streets were walled with plants forming hedges above the street.

Then we visited the Chiran Peace Museum which honours the 1036 young kamikaze pilots who departed from this region during the final months of World War Two. The tree at the entrance is shaped to represent a plane.

The museum includes letters they sent to their parents as they were about to leave on their mission as well as information about the young men themselves. There’s a memorial area for them too. 

I can understand the museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki being called peace museums, but I was flummoxed by this being called one. Together with the children in Hiroshima pulling down houses to create firebreaks, this documents how Japan was destroying its future towards the end of the war.

We then visited Kagoshima, where we first saw Satsuma Kiriko glass. They were blowing and cutting intricate glass. 

Next door were the Sengan-en Gardens built in 1658 by the head of the Shimazu family, using the active Sakurajima volcano and Kinko Bay as borrowed scenery. 

The gardens were expansive and beautiful, but the main reason they are a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site is that this was the place where industrialisation started in Japan.

There was an exhibition of chrysanthemums at the gardens.

Shimo-koshiki

Today we visited the Koshikijima islands off the coast of Kagoshima. 

We took the tender to the harbour, where we were greeted by a welcoming group.

I chose to go for a walk. The bus took us a fair way up the main road up the island. 

Then we walked further up, then slightly back down to an exceptionally steep trail going down to a three tiered waterfall called Sebi Kannon Mitaki. 

The trail between the tiers was as steep as the trail down to the waterfall itself, and some people needed a lot of assistance before they would go down some sections. 

After the waterfall, we walked along a path to a deserted village where we were met by the bus. 

We then explored the local town where we had lunch, 

visited the museum 

and enjoyed walking along the beach. 

The whole island has a small population which has declined rapidly in recent years. The road was obviously rarely used, and many of the houses were no longer lived in.

Nagasaki

Today we docked at Nagasaki and visited the peace park. There were monuments to peace from a large number of countries including New Zealand. 

Like at Hiroshima, we weren’t allowed to photograph inside the memorial, but I thought it was better at telling the story. Nagasaki was originally the place where European merchants were allowed to trade with Japan. As a result, a higher percentage of the population is Christian. Again, this was a place where there was a lot of heavy industry, including ship building. The area is shaped as a long valley, with the port at the end. 

The bombers couldn’t strike the first or second targets that they’d been given, and dropped the automatic bomb further up the valley than had been intended. This meant the ship works weren’t as damaged as they intended, and that the bomb was dropped directly over the Christian cathedral.

A POW camp was quite close by as was a place where Korean forced labourers were kept, so there were quite a number of non-Japanese casualties. The memorial talked about this, and had videos of stories from Korean and Australian survivors, as well as Japanese people - men, women and children. The Koreans in particular had a bad time after the bombing because they couldn’t speak Japanese and tell people what they needed, and some were just left to die after they’d been rescued. 

We went to ground zero, where we saw the level of the earth where the bomb exploded.

Like at Hiroshima, people had made many origami cranes, and they had strung some of them along the wall of the memorial.

Afterwards, we went to the recreation of the Dutch merchant village that’s on the actual site of the original one. They’ve done a lot of archeological research to reconstruct it as it was, and are gradually building it. The Dutch asked Japan to do this with the money for reparation for the war. 

After dinner we visited the lookout and saw the lights of Nagasaki below.