August 9, 1945

At 11:02 on the morning of 9 August 1945, a plutonium bomb exploded roughly 500 metres above the Urakami valley in northern Nagasaki. Estimates of the dead by the end of that year run to about 74,000, with a similar number injured.

Nagasaki was not the primary target. The aircraft was sent to Kokura, and found it obscured by cloud and smoke. After three passes it turned to its secondary target. Nagasaki was overcast too; a break in the cloud opened at the last moment, and the bomb was released visually over a valley two miles north of the intended aiming point.

A gap in the clouds decided which city this was.

The hills, and the terrible irony

The Urakami valley is ringed by hills, and they contained the blast — one reason the destruction, though catastrophic, did not spread across the whole city as it had in Hiroshima's flat delta.

And the district it destroyed was Urakami: the Christian quarter, home to the community that had survived 250 years in hiding and been permitted to worship openly for barely seventy years. Urakami Cathedral, then the largest church in East Asia, stood about 500 metres from the hypocentre. It came down instantly. Two priests hearing confessions and their congregation were killed.

A remnant of the cathedral wall was left standing for years as a ruin, and the decision to remove it and rebuild rather than preserve it as a monument is still argued about in this city.

Nagai Takashi

A radiologist at the Nagasaki Medical College, Nagai Takashi, was already dying of leukaemia from occupational radiation exposure when the bomb fell. His wife was killed; he found her rosary in the ashes of their house. Injured, he worked as a doctor in the ruins, then wrote from a two-metre-square hut called Nyokodō — "love your neighbour as yourself" — until his death in 1951.

His book The Bells of Nagasaki was for a time the most-read account of the bombing in Japan. His theology, which framed the destruction of the Christian quarter as a sacrifice, comforted many and disturbs others still. Both reactions are worth knowing before you read the plaques.

What to see, and how

The Atomic Bomb Museum and the Peace Park sit at the northern end of the tram line, roughly twenty minutes from the wharf. The hypocentre is marked by a plain black pillar in a small park; near it stands the surviving one-legged torii of Sanno Shrine, half of a gate left upright by the blast, and a wall of Urakami Cathedral moved to the site.

Nagasaki's memorial is quieter than Hiroshima's and asks a different question. Hiroshima addresses the world; Nagasaki, having been chosen almost at random and having lost its most persecuted community, tends to address something smaller and harder — chance, and endurance.