Nagasaki Peace Memorials – More than Peace Park and Atomic Bomb Museum

Finally, I completed my long overdue post on the Nagasaki Peace Memorials.

These days marks the 80th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The more notable date, 6th August 2025, which marked the 80th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki, passed here without much fanfare. I remembered it, but the national news here in Germany didn’t even register it, and neither did the somewhat larger news corporation, the BBC: It has the US Tariffs, the Sicily Bridge Projects, Ukraine, Gaza. Not even a blip although I give them credit for broadcasting a documentary on Hiroshima at the end of July.

With our part of the world feeling like on the brink of several wars like rarely ever in the past decade, I felt -disappointed. No remembrance. No reflection. I’ve seen part of missiles being shuttled around in my childhood and remember being extremely scared, and I had then a happy few decades where was was relatively far from my mind.

Having visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki , I have only spend longer time in Nagasaki, so I hope that by the 9th of August I will have a reasonably solid post here on the Peace Memorials of Nagasaki – which often get much fewer visits than the Hiroshima Peace Memorials.

Until the Shinkansen gets completed all the way from Hakata, Nagasaki will be a bit of a lengthy journey. However, if you want to visit a pleasant mid-sized city surrounded by stunning scenery with perhaps the most multi-cultural history in Japan, you shouldn’t leave Nagasaki out anyway. And then, there are the Peace memorials – probably more, but much less famous than those in Hiroshima.

I was quite surprised that there is very little information on Nagasaki’s Peace Memorials other than The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and Peace Park, so I decided to write my own post.

Walking the Nagasaki Peace Memorials

This post is structured as a leisurely walk which will take you 6-8 hours, depending on your length of stay at each site. I suggest you start and end your walk at either the Nagasaki Peace Park or the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

I suggest you use the Tram (Line 1 and 3) between Nyoko-do (Ohashi Stop) and the city center, since it’s otherwise a 3km walk along a relatively busy road. So you will need tram fare, which is a 150 JPY flat fare per ride which you pay on exit, or 600JPY for a One.day pass. You can also pay with Nimoca, Sugoca and national IC cards.

The Nagasaki Tourism Office has a walking tour itinerary on Nagasaki Peace Memorials here and is generally a good source for all things Nagasaki.

Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum

The most logical place to start your Nagasaki Peace Memorial visit of Nagasaki is the Atomic Bomb Museum. Located in a quieter part of town close to the hypocentre, you easily take a tram for 15 minutes from the main train station, and walk up a short steep road to the museum.

Depending on season and time of day, this might get plenty of Japanese school classes. I visited in June on a weekday afternoon and saw very light crowds. It was my “last chance visit”, having seen most other memorials on walks before and after class, and I did not want to visit, because I visited the Hiroshima Museum years ago, and not only was it excellent, but extremely heavy on my mind.

The Nagasaki Museum is smaller, and, if you have to choose between the two museums, I would think the Hiroshima one is slightly superior. However, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum is very well presented, on the smaller side, and it takes about an hour to visit. From the entrance, you descend down a large spiral staircase into the darkened exhibition rooms – where you will learn a bit about Nagasaki infrastructure, Nagasaki being an industrial hub for nearly a century, and therefore identified as a potential target. However, the primary target was Kokura (today’s Kitakyushu City) for being a major weapons producing area. At least the Americans seemed have learned something from the bombing of Dresden and after some deliberation, decided to remove Kyoto from the list of targets, adding NAgasaki as a secondary target instead.

So long story cut short, Nagasaki was bombed in the late morning of 9 August, under poor visibility, so instead of the Mitsubishi Shipyards, a genteel residential suburb or Urakami was hit – and still managed to destroy half of the city and killed about 20.000 instantly, with the total death toll estimated at about 75.000 people (source).

The museum has a replica of the bomb, called “Fat Man” and being heavier and more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

There are so many documents from what the city looked like, and accounts from survivors. Very poignant. And, being a relatively small exhibit, it may leave you with some mental space to learn about the development of the nuclear bomb, and the scientific milestones that led there.

Back at ground level, you will have a chance to admire the origami cranes – in their thousands, traditionally, from paper but other mediums, in all sizes and in stunning colours. A poignant but also somewhat uplifting finale of the visit.

The museum is open daily from 08.30 to 17.30 but note hours may vary.

Very few visit the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, situated right next to the museum, an elegant sparse subterranean space of remembrance.

You can visit the museum’s official website for practical info on visiting here. I apologize for not having photographs of the museum – I visited on my last day, it was moderately busy, and I was in a pretty strange mood before I even entered the museum – definitely not in a mood to take photographs.

Hypocentre Park

From the museum, it makes most sense to continue to the Hypocentre Park on your way to Peace Park, a small area that marks the Ground Zero, with lots of explanatory steles and boards and a simple monument. It doesn’t get that many visitors, but I recommend visiting, as it is very tranquil and those boards contain a lot of information.

Also, it is a glowing testimonial for the resilience of nature. Although people forecast that nothing would grow here for decades, the first plants would return a month after the bombing, and today’s park is a green subtropical oasis and, like peace park, it has over 500 cherry trees.

Peace Park Nagasaki

This park, called Heiwa-koen in Japanese, is probably the most famous of Nagasaki’s Peace Memorials, and therefore, can get very busy but it’s so large, it won’t feel crowded. You can walk directly on the short and obvious St. Paul’s Road, or walk through Hypocentre Park (recommended). This vast memorial-studded space was created 10 years after the bombing and serves as Nagasaki’s major memorial space. It is easily accessible with lots of paving, and in spring, it is a favourite cherrry blossom spot. From the Peace Fountian it only takes a few minutes to reach the giant Peace Statue of a man pointing to the sky with his right hand, while the left is stretched out towards the ground, symbolizing peace and humanity. There are a lot of parallels to ancient Buddha statues here, and its creator Kitamura Seibo had by then a reputation for his masculine statues.

The electric blue large man may not be to everyone’s taste, but here, as the final point of a very large memorial- filled park that feels light and friendly and, yes, cherry blossom viewing and picnics here are absolutely welcome.

Nyoko-do Hermitage

From Peace Park, you have several options to visit other monuments, and I recommend you do, as these get relatively few visitors and are somehow part of the remembrance practiced at Nagasaki.

A short walk leads you to Urakami Cathedral, a Taisho-era relatively nondescript church in Western Style, serving Northern Nagasaki’s sizeable Christian community. Destroyed just 20 years after its completion, it was rebuilt in the 1950’s and has some charred statues saved from the rubble as a memorial.

However I highly encourage you to walk 5-10 minutes to the North into the residential are to visit the Nyoko-do Hermitage, the tiny two-tatami hut that served as a residence of the “Saint of Nagasaki”, the physician Takashi Nagai, who lost home and family in the bombings and, gravely ill with radiation-induced leukemia, continued to help bomb victims and teach until his death in 1951.

You can glimpse into his hut where he practised, often bed-bound, and visit the modern museum next to the hermitage. 

The Nyoko-do Hermitage is open daily from 9.00 to 17.00.

Sanno Shrine and One-legged Tori

You could now walk a few minutes to Ohashi Tram Stop and return to the centre, but I encourage you to continue walking – consider Urakami Cathedral which looks a little boring to us Europeans but serves as a memorial, have an excellent matcha latte at the lovely minuscule Juma Cafe, and step up Sakamoto Hill to the University of nagasaki Sakamoto Campus, formerly the Nagasaki Medical College, which is dotted with smaller memorials, lop-sided pillars telling the story how the campus was razed to the ground – only one small 1940’s guest house was the only survivor of the bomb.

If you are not massively into walking, take the tram from Ohashi to UNiversity Hospital (Daigaku Byoin-mae) and walk the pleasant lane of the mini entertainment quarter to Sanno Street, where you will see the one-legged Torii up some steps. All sites in Nagasaki are extremely well signposted, but you can ask for Sanno-jinja if you need directions. Walk a few steps up to see that resilient torii – it survived the bomb, too and was left in situ. So did the camphor tree of Sanno Shrine, which you reach after another five minutes of gentle climbing – a very pleasant walk through semi-pedestrianized area, filled with traditional houses, schools and kindergartens. Sanno Shrine itself is pleasant, very small, but it is the trees that make up the memorial – quiet and powerful and very Japanese way.

Fukusaiji the “Giant Woman on a Turtle Temple”

From here it is a fair distance to the next station, so I suggest you walk eitehr back to where you came from, or walk to Urakami, where you can stop at the excellent independen Komekoya Coffee stands, then hop on a tranm to Nagasaki Station and climb the steep streets into the hill side. You may see a silver Kannon statue peeking behind the mid-rises already. This temple, Fukusaiji, is one of Nagasaki’s oldest temples, founded in 1628 by Chinese traders. THe historic building was completely destroyed in the bombing and the temple was rebuil tin 1979 in a very unusual style – the Hondo is built n the shape of a concrete turtle, and atop a turtle stands a giant silvery Kannon. After looking at the Hondo, don’t miss the basement, where a Foucault’s Pendulum, one of the largest in the world, apparently, has been swinging surrounded by memorial tablets of ten thousands of WW2 Dead.

The temple bell atop the gate is rung daily at 11.02. the time of the bombing, and if you find the care taker, you may ask to ring the bell.

This area is one of Nagasaki’s temple Streets, the other one being the Southern Teramachi-dori, and if you visit now, you should be able to visit the newly restored Kofuku-ji, Nagasaki’s oldest, and amble through a beautiful residential area to Suwa Shrine, the location of the annual prime Matsuri of NAgasaki, the Nagasaki Kunchi (7-9 October).

All this should take you a short day if you visit every memorial, and even if you mix and match your own route, it is well worth your while to see the very different peace memorials of Nagasaki. When I looked for information, I found very little online unless I searched for specific sites, so I hope this post will provide you with information in one place on Nagasaki’s well-known peace memorials.

I studied in Nagasaki in Spring 2023 and spent six weeks in the city, so I can help you with lots more information – just drop me a line, or a comment. Feel free to read my other Nagasaki posts, including an itinerary, a post on its temples, onsen visits, and last not least… fabric shopping. I also saw plenty of the surrounding area on weekends, so you can read on Nagasaki’s tea gardens, knife shopping, and a couple ceramics posts with Okawachiyama and treasure hunting in Arita.

Where to stay

I stayed in four very different places in Nagasaki as I “mixed and matched” , not finding one single place to stay for six weeks that easily that wasn’t an expensive AirBnB.

My soft landing, and first place I stayed for a week, was the Grand Base Nagasaki City, a small apartment hotels in a nice typical Nagasaki residential neighbourhood. For about 270 Euro for seven days, I had a light very newly furnished comfortable modern large (32sqm) studio apartment with kitchenette and a large bathroom and my own washing machine – and Western beds to get used to all things Japanese gently. I walked five minutes to the nearest tram stop, and about fifteen minutes to Nagasaki Station.

My second station, in the same lovely area, was the Relaxing Inn Origami, a modern inn with both Western and Japanese style rooms. I paid around 36 Euros per night – for single occupancy. I added my husband once he had booked his flight for part of my stay there, and the price rose by approximately 70% for this period. My room, freshly renovated and lovely, required some adjustment, sleeping on futon that were a bit firm, and studying and eating at the traditional low Japanese table. It was peaceful and quiet, and since my husband visited during that time, we had plenty space for two people and a very cheap (500 Yen) on site parking garage space. The owner appeared to be a coffee aficionado and roasted his own coffee, serving a portion of the lovely coffee every morning.

Third stop, for less than a week, was the S-Peria Hotel Nagasaki. The S-Peria chain is still my favourite of all low to mid-price Japanese business hotels chains. The location, a walk from Nagasaki Station, was super central, allowing me to walk pretty much anywhere in the centre, but the tram stop outside made travelling within the city super easy. The room a fairly general size for a business hotel, had an extremely comfortable bed, space to work, big bathroom, and a separate toilet, laundry facilities, and good quality furnishings. It was a little bit of a squeeze for my husband and me and our accumulated stuff, but for a short time, definitely manageable. I paid 37 Euros per night, with my husband staying, that rice rose to about 50 Euros per night.

Last not least, in a quest to save a lot of money and to be close to the university, I stayed for two weeks at the Himawari Hotel in Urakami. Even though this was the simplest and by far the cheapest accommodation, I really loved it, a lot. It’s great for visiting most Peace Memorial sites, if you have business to attend at Sakamoto Campus, and it’s literally 100 metres from a tram stop for the centre. My double room was bright, relatively large except for the minuscule bathroom, and the bed was comfortable and clean. There was a shared kitchen and plenty of fridge space, so it was easy to revert to my favourite rice-natto-tofu breakfasts.

The owners were some of the loveliest people, letting me use the washing machine, offering to drive me locally, and him and his wife were around a lot keeping the place extremely clean. I paid about 18 Euros per night, a huge bargain for a good-sized private room close to public transport.

The Small Print

I stayed in Nagasaki in May and June 2023 as part of a professional course at the University of Nagasaki. All expenses were paid for by myself, with a small contribution (<10% of total cost) towards tuition fees from my employer.

I pay my way and I am happy to bleat it out every single time. All my reviews are voluntary, no bias, no kickbacks. This post does contain affiliate hotel links to Booking.com, which means that I may receive a small commission, which I use to host this blog.

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