Nagasaki
When travel photography becomes social history ...
Eighty years ago on this day, the 9th August, the second atomic bomb was dropped onto a suburb of the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Today in the city there is a memorial park and a museum in remembrance of the estimated 74,000 people who died.
These pictures were taken in the autumn of 1996 on a work-related visit to Nagasaki. Given the date, it seemed timely for these photographs to be brought out of my files and shared. The epicentre of the explosion is represented by the Peace Statue and is surrounded by fountains that represent water as an offering to those who succumbed to the awful aftermath. There is always class loads of Japanese school children brought to the memorial park by their teachers.
For many centuries, Nagasaki was the principal port of entry for foreign traders. As a consequence, there has always been a strong catholic community. All that survived the explosion was one small corner of the catholic Urakami cathedral, which is now preserved.
It perhaps useful to reflect that pictures such as these were taken in the days of film. Were digital cameras then available, one can speculate as to whether the images would still have been accessible to me after nearly 30 years.