Here’s a view from our hotel room looking up the valley and away from the seaport.
There’s lots of industry in this area – especially Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and this is the main reason that this city was a target for the atomic bomb.
Nagasaki
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Japan
USA
Santa Fe
We are staying at the La Fonda on the Plaza Hotel right in the centre of Old Santa Fe. I thought it might have been named after the actor Henry la Fonda but the word ‘fonda’ in Spanish simply means an ‘inn’ The site of this hotel has been the location of various inns since […]
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Every Day Life
Family
Japan
A School Teacher’s Influence
I’m with Miss Yoshiko Denogami who has been visiting us over the last few days. In Japan, she is more formally known as Denogami Sensei. (Sensei is a Japanese honorific and a word that is literally translated as “person born before another”. In general usage, it is used with proper form, after a person’s name […]
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Japan
Flea Market and Photo Tour
We noticed from our hotel window yesterday, that people were setting up a market in the Shinkuku Gyoen Park behind the Tokyo Government Building, so we strolled over to see what might be on sale. As you would expect in a flea market, the little spaces marked out on the ground for individual stalls all […]
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On the morning of August 9, 1945, the U.S. B-29 Superfortress Bockscar, flown by the crew of 393rd Squadron commander Major Charles W. Sweeney, carried the nuclear bomb code-named “Fat Man”, with Kokura as the primary target and Nagasaki the secondary target. The mission plan for the second attack was nearly identical to that of the Hiroshima mission, with two B-29’s flying an hour ahead as weather scouts and two additional B-29’s in Sweeney’s flight for instrumentation and photographic support of the mission. Sweeney took off with his weapon already armed but with the electrical safety plugs still engaged.Observers aboard the weather planes reported both targets clear. When Sweeney’s aircraft arrived at the assembly point for his flight off the coast of Japan, the third plane, Big Stink, flown by the group’s Operations Officer, Lt. Col. James I. Hopkins, Jr. failed to make the rendezvous. Bockscar and the instrumentation plane circled for forty minutes without locating Hopkins. Already thirty minutes behind schedule, Sweeney decided to fly on without Hopkins.By the time they reached Kokura a half hour later, a 70% cloud cover had obscured the city, prohibiting the visual attack required by orders. After three runs over the city, and with fuel running low because a transfer pump on a reserve tank had failed before take-off, they headed for their secondary target, Nagasaki.Thus Nagasaki was never the primary target