While Axel was exploring the old Dutch remnants in Nagasaki, Miho and I took the tramway to the university and walked through alternating snow, sleet and rain to the school of public health where 12 eager students were awaiting us.
The best thing in Japan, during the cold season, is the heated toilet seat. I could manage the cold knowing that somewhere a heated toilet seat was waiting for me.
At lunch time we had the traditional Nagasaki noodle soup called Champun, that was just the right thing to warm up. After lunch we continued the ‘lecture’ and I had the students explore the meaning and utility of the concepts of mission and vision. It was all very new and mysterious.
We met up with Axel at the Atomic bomb museum – a complex of exhibits, reflective pool, meditation rooms, gruesome photos and artifacts. The whole thing made me extremely angry – the pictures of the male protagonists in this drama: Hitler, Stalin, the Manhattan project men, the Japanese, Truman, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Russell – the latter eventually realizing that the bomb was a really bad thing and becoming peace activists. The only women portrayed where survivors with their horrendous stories of loss and suffering, and the non survivors, the charred bodies of mothers and their babies. What were people thinking?
We rode back in a packed tramway, sober and shivering from the cold, me longing for the warm toilet seat that we found across from the old Decima (Dutch) enclave in a restaurant named Garcon Ken. Ken was there waiting for customers in a tiny but empty restaurant. We stated that we came for drinks, to warm up. But Ken expertly seduced us to stay for a meal, bringing out one delectable tapa after another, plying us with ‘warm up’ drinks. And so we had a French Japanese meal (fish of course) that will be among the more memorable culinary experiences of this trip.
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