Visiting Nagasaki on a Spring Day

   My family and I flew to Nagasaki from Itami.  We caught an airport limousine from Namba to Itami Airport, which only took us half an hour.  It was quite a short trip.  Although Kansai Airport is much more convenient for us, as we live in Sakai,south of Osaka, I can understand why some people are against closing Itami Airport.  Just as Kansai airport is convenient for us, Itami Airport is convenient for a lot of people who live or work in Osaka, closer to it.   From Nagasaki Airport, we sailed to Huis ten bosch, an amusement park.  Accessing Huis ten bosch by sea might sound romantic, but it was hard for my daughters after the flight.  The combination of being airsick and seasick brought on my elder daughter's headache.  I wonder if travelling by air and then land might have been better.  Or had it onle been brought on only the combination  of being airsick and landsick(?)? 
  The rain, which started when we left Huis ten bosch, fell harder when we got off the train at the Nagasaki station.  So we decided to visit China Town to have lunch first.  There we enjoyed Sara Udon and Chanpon, both Nagasaki-style Chinese noodles, at a Chinese restaurant near the entrance of the town.  After we finished eating, we went out to find the rain had stopped.   Next we visited Oranda Zaka (or Dutch Hill), a tiny short slope paved with stone slates, as we had planned before the start of the rain.  The buildings along the street didn't looked Westernized from the view point or standard of today.  The buildings with wooden walls and tiled roofs, reminded me of my dear old days.  When I was a small child, every modern building such as schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. was like that.  Those buildings were considered modern at that time in Japan means Western.  The schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. played their role in modernizing the Japanese society some decades ago.  A high economic growth after World War II and, especially, the bubble economy meant the Japanese society surpassed its own modernization.   Then we walked on to visit Oura Tenshu-do (an old Catholic church in Oura).  The slope to the church was crowded with noisy and eye-catching (although some of them surely trying to look fashionable) souvenir shops, which shows how we have surpassed ourselves.   In Oura Tenshu-do and in a small museum by the church, I was surprised how my daughters have grown-up because they were able to read explanations so intensely.  I found the story of a French clergyman, the one who  'found' Christians in Nagasaki area at the end of Edo era, and how they had survived 7 generations of oppressive measures including crucifixion moving.  The finding led to the last and dreadful suppression by the Tokugawa Shogunate.   After that, we took a trolley train from Oura Tenshu-do-shita to Hamaguchi-cho to see the Atomic Bomb Museum.  It was my second visit there.  I have visited the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima twice, too.  I just hope we will never have to experience an atomic bomb and have such a museum in Baghdad or elsewhere.   The stories about the religious oppression and the atomic bombing give the town a tragic characteristic, which makes the Nagasaki city very unique in Japan.   Besides its tragic characteristic, I should point out another uniqueness of the Nagasaki city, the taste of Chinese culture.  On our way from Oranda-zaka to Oura Tenshu-do, we had dropped in at a Confucious Temple, which had very Chinese buildings.  The existence of the temple and the China town, one of the three largest China towns in Japan, tells us Nagasaki has had a significant number of Chinese residents.  With historical elements of both the western culture and the Chinese culture , it makes the city exotic and attractive to tourists.  When looked at by sightseers, it seems like the tourist cities sometimes exaggerate themselves.   Some exaggeration of their characters may appeal; too much exaggeration can damage their images.  The much crowded street to Oura Tenshu-do tells us the importance of equilibrium.