Nagasaki is probably most well known as the target of the second atomic bomb blast. However, we did not visit any A-bomb related sites. Basically there were two reasons for this. The first was that we've both been to Hiroshima and visited the A-bomb museum there and know that it is an incredibly depressing way to spend a day. Much though we feel for Nagasaki's A-bomb victims we decided we wanted to do some more upbeat things.
The other reason is that the Americans actually missed hitting the downtown core of the city and accidentally dropped the bomb on a suburb about 3 kilometres from today's downtown. Because the museum and the peace park are at ground zero and we were getting around town on foot this would have meant a lot of walking through some drab urban sprawl to get there.
On the first day of our trip we got to see quite a few temples. Thanks to Nagasaki's mountainous location these (along with a lot of people) were lucky enough to escape the bomb blast because the mountains shielded them. Nagasaki's temples are very similar to Chinese temples of the late Ming dynasty, mainly because they were mostly built by Chinese traders resident in the city in the early 17th century. Sofukuji is one of these temples:
This is Ena looking at a big wooden fish they have:
This is a view of the city from a graveyard behind some of the Zen temples:
This is Kofukuji, which is another nice temple:
These little guys are just too cute:
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