November 6th and 7th At Sea and Nagasaki

 

Thursday was a sea day.

On Friday we arrived in Nagasaki.   We went with one of the cruise line tours, and had a nice guide, Mr. Sato.   Our first stop was the Nagasaki Peace Park, which is built on the ground zero site of the atomic bomb.  The Peace Statue (first photo) is dedicated to the victims of the atomic blast, with the right hand pointing to the sky where the bomb came from and the left stretched out for peace.   The second statue was given to the park by St. Paul, Minnesota.  There are statues throughout the park from around the world.

An ancient Japanese Legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane of eternal good luck.  So people make cranes as a symbol of luck and peace.  Several school groups who had made 1000 paper cranes and put them together as streamers presented them to the Peace Park.  In some cases they sang songs.   It was very moving. (third and fourth photo.)  The fifth site is a obelisk at the actual ground zero site.  Finally, there is the clock in the adjacent museum, that was stopped in the blast.

We then visited Dejima, which is a small man made island built in 1643 by local merchants.  For two hundred years it was occupied by Dutch traders, who were the only non-Japanese individuals allowed in all of Japan.  They could not leave the island, and only a few select Japanese were allowed to visit the island.  But goods were moved in and out through this one site and it helped the Japanese keep an eye on what was happening in the rest of the world.  The first photo is of the actual island, the second is a scale model of the island (note the scale size trees), and the third is the inside of one of the reconstructed buildings.

We enjoyed a very nice traditional Japanese lunch, getting good with the chop sticks!!!

Finally we went to Glover Garden. Thomas Glover was from Scotland and came to Japan in 1859 as a merchant trader.  He was instrumental in the industrialization of Japan, among other things, helping start a ship building company that became the Mitsubishi Company.  (As a side note, our cruise ship, the Sapphire Princess was built by Mitsubishi here in Nagasaki.)  Glover married a Japanese woman named Tusuru who always had clothing and items with butterflies.  One theory is that Puccini (first statue) developed the story of Madam Butterfly (second statue) in part based on Tusuru.  Another interesting Glover story is that he was involved in establishing the Japan Brewing Company, which later became Kirin Beer.  If you look at the label of a bottle of Kirin Beer, you will see a dragon that looks like it could have a moustache; that moustache is supposedly for Glover, based on the moustache he had.  In the park was another girl feeding giant koi fish in the pond. One of the fish is supposed to be worth $200,000!  We were also able to look down on our ship from the park.

We then walked down the hill to the ship at the end of another great day.