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今日も夏日で日差しは強い。今日一日は長崎を足で回り、車は車庫で過ごす。午前中は駅より南にあるオランダ坂、オランダ坂途中にある西洋館群、グラバー邸（園）、大浦天主堂と、どの観光客も訪ねるお決まりのコース。
昨日長崎について早々、港に超大型のクルーズ船（４５００人の乗船客＋１５００人の乗組員）が停まっているのを見たのだか、どうやらその乗客である中国人観光客が全員グラバー邸に来ていたように思う。
朝から甲高い中国語が飛び交う中、庭園を見て歩く。邸からは昔、きっと遮るものもなく港を一望出来ていたに違いない。長い「ひさし」が家のどの部分にもついていて、それがグラバー邸を魅力的にしている。
石炭や武器の輸入で財を築いたスコットランド人だったようだ。
午後からは駅より北にある１７世紀に処刑された（よって聖人となった）キリスト教信者の碑や、原爆が投下された場所、および原爆の資料館と気の重くなる見学地であった。
こちらは不思議と中国人観光客は少なく、むしろヨーロッパ系、フィリピン人、韓国人の観光客が目立った。街の中を歩くのも、この照り返しの中なかなか体力を消耗することで、山の中歩きの方が楽だったかなあ・・と思う次第。
Today the car stays in the car park. Because breakfast is too expensive for us, we eat in our room with things we bought yesterday at AEON. There is also a new-fangled coffee machine with these new-fangled capsules. We read through the operating instructions several times until we finally get some coffee from this marvel of technology.
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| Dutch Slope |
We walk about 20 minutes to the first of the few sights in the city. Not much waso8 left after the attack in 1945. It's the "Dutch Slope", a steep, cobbled path that a Dutchman blasted out of the mountain about 120 years ago to get to the homes of the foreigners. Because there were no other foreigners in Japan apart from the Dutch for several decades, all foreigners were still referred to as "Dutch".  |
| Lower Class |
There are still some old residential buildings in which the "simple" foreigners, i.e. the craftsmen, ship crews and shipyard workers, lived. The "upper class" lived further up!
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| Upper Class |
Take the Glover family, for example. Mr Glover from Scotland worked his way up from a lowly clerk to become one of the wealthiest men in Kyushu. He became a consultant for Mitsubishi, made millions from the coal trade and was the founder of the KIRIN brewery. You can visit his home and get an idea of the family's wealth. Like all sensible foreigners, he married a Japanese woman. His son ruined the company and committed suicide in 1945.
Nagasaki is also the centre of Christianity in Japan. There were countless churches in the city before the war. Today, an archbishop (!) looks after the faithful. Even the Pope visited the city and the Oura Church, where Japanese priests were trained.
A beautiful museum explains the painful history of the Christians, who were persecuted for centuries and killed for their faith.
In their honour we visit the memorial to the 26 Christians - foreign missionaries and Japanese believers - who were crucified in the city in 1626 because they would not renounce their faith.
We take a tram, which was probably taken from the transport museum, to the "Peace Park" and remember the more than 70,000 people who lost their lives here senselessly and in a fraction of a second during the last days of the war in 1945. We walk silently past the "Point Zero" of the plutonium bomb explosion. What hit it there? The largest Catholic church in the whole of Asia at the time.
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| ”Ground Zero” |
Exhibits and films are shown in the museum. The images are gruesome. Piles of corpses piled up all over the city. It must have been hell. You are not allowed to take photos inside. I am therefore copying the famous picture of the unknown boy here, which says everything about this catastrophe:The photograph was taken by Joe O‘Donnel, an American soldier, then working for the United
States Marine Corps a few days after the bombing and the surrender. He kept the picture in a trunk and did not publish it until 1989.
"I saw a boy about ten years old walking
by. He was carrying a baby on his back. In those days in Japan, we often saw
children playing with their little brothers or sisters on their backs, but this
boy was clearly different. I could see that he had come to this place for a
serious reason. He was wearing no shoes. His face was hard. The little head was
tipped back as if the baby were fast asleep. The boy stood there for five or
ten minutes.
The men in white masks walked over to him and quietly began to take off the
rope that was holding the baby. That is when I saw that the baby was already
dead. The men held the body by the hands and feet and placed it on the fire.
The boy stood there straight without moving, watching the flames. He was biting
his lower lip so hard that it shone with blood. The flame burned low like the
sun going down. The boy turned around and walked silently away."
Joe O'Donnell
