The Forgotten Ground Zero -- Nagasaki, Reduced To Ashes By An Atomic Bomb, Rises Again In Beauty, Grace And Good Will

Nothing about the place seems particularly remarkable.

A small oasis of open space called Hypocenter Park, it sits inconspicuously beside the main thoroughfare a few minutes north of the downtown. Nagasaki.

Shade trees arch gracefully above neatly trimmed hedgerows, offering a welcome respite from the clatter and congestion of the surrounding city. It is a place of peace and quiet.

But at the northern margin of the park stands a slender column of stark black stone that commemorates an event of great and terrible significance to the course of human history.

Fifty summers ago - on Aug. 9, 1945 - an atomic bomb fell from the belly of an American B-29, the Bock's Car, and was detonated 1,650 feet directly above what is now Hypocenter Park. The bomb was dropped to hasten the end of World War II. It did. But the citizens of Nagasaki paid an appalling price.

In the blink of an eye, three square miles of the city were obliterated. Two-thirds of the 240,000 residents were killed outright or hideously injured.

Half a century after the fact, the mind balks at taking measure of the suffering and devastation that ensued; it is impossible to picture this park, this verdant plot of earth, at the epicenter of a scorched and lifeless landscape.

More than a million Japanese a year visit Hypocenter Park and the adjacent Atomic Bomb Museum, where they stare at graphic photographs of the destruction and contemplate such grim relics as a

steel helmet cradling fragments of a skull, or the remains of a human hand fused inside a blob of glass.

But beyond the borders of Japan, Nagasaki has received scant attention - it has become the "forgotten" Ground Zero. Because Hiroshima was bombed three days earlier than Nagasaki, the former has always eclipsed the latter in the minds of most Americans. But the destruction of Nagasaki was no less tragic or portentous.

Within five years, at least 140,000 people had died. Six weeks after the bomb was dropped - some five weeks after the Japanese surrendered - an American military officer participating in the occupation of Nagasaki reported that the "smell of death and corruption" remained pervasive and that "nothing has escaped its touch. In most ruined cities, you can bury the dead, clean up the rubble, rebuild the houses and have a living city again. One feels that it is not so here. Like the ancient Sodom and Gomorrah, its site has been sown with salt."

After measuring levels of residual radiation throughout the city, technicians from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined that much of Nagasaki would remain barren of plant and animal life for 75 years.

They were wrong.

Seasonal rains and powerful tides cleansed the land and harbor of fallout much faster than anyone predicted. Within two months of the holocaust, the first seedlings began to sprout from beneath the rubble.

Five decades later, the obelisk marking Ground Zero is shaded by a copse of tall, robust trees. Aside from a handful of prominent artifacts - a wrecked stone arch known as the "One-Legged Torii"; eerie fragments of religious statuary; a famous church bell, rung morning and night, that somehow emerged from the devastation unscathed - there is little to alert the casual observer that not so very long ago Nagasaki lay in radioactive ruins.

The most obvious reminder of the tragic past is the preponderance of ugly concrete architecture throughout the north and central parts of the city, the result of hastily rebuilding everything from the ground up in the 1950s and '60s.

Nagasaki manages to project considerable appeal despite a blight of drab, modern buildings. Although curiosity about the bomb is what brings most visitors here, one soon discovers that the resurrected city of 450,000 is a worthy destination in its own right.

Nagasaki is blessed with an extraordinary natural setting that rivals Hong Kong or San Francisco.

Steep hills and ridges overlook a fiordlike harbor. Besides providing stunning views and backdrops, the convolutions of the local topography shielded many neighborhoods from the atomic blast in 1945, thereby preserving an array of ancient Zen,

Shinto and Confucian shrines - as well as the oldest Christian cathedral in Japan, the Oura Catholic Church.

As these religious institutions suggest, the city has a rich cultural history. In 1542, upon the accidental arrival of a Portuguese ship that had sailed off-course, Nagasaki became the principal link between intensely xenophobic Japan and the outside world.

VIBRANT PAST, PRESENT

Dutch, Chinese and Scottish traders and missionaries arrived soon after the Portuguese, transforming the city into a nexus of wealth and cosmopolitan refinement. The beloved Puccini opera, "Madame Butterfly," was set in Nagasaki. By the early 20th century the city had grown into a booming industrial center.

Nagasaki is no less vibrant or fascinating today. In the heart of the city is the Maruyama entertainment district, a maze of narrow, twisting alleys jammed with bars and pachinko parlors - pachinko being a form of gambling, similar to pinball, that is a national obsession.

Tantalizing restaurants beckon throughout Maruyama, ranging from boisterous, inexpensive sidewalk grills called robatayaki, to pricey establishments specializing in fugu - a poisonous fish, considered a great delicacy, which is deadly if prepared wrong.

SIGHTS AND SCENERY

A few blocks from Maruyama, a series of arched bridges - including Spectacles Bridge, built by a Chinese monk in 1634, the oldest stone bridge in Japan - spans the Nakajimagawa Stream. At the southern end of the city, museums, fountains, and the rebuilt mansions of 19th-century expatriates sprawl across a bucolic hillside park called Glover Garden.

When the weather is clear, the summit of Mount Fugen is visible on the eastern horizon, belching sulphurous plumes of ash. This steep volcanic peak juts from Unzen National Park, 20 miles from the city as the crane flies, a pristine expanse of steaming hot springs and alpine woodlands criss-crossed by hiking trails (if you're feeling lazy, Unzen's heights can also be reached by aerial tram).

Thanks to its history of foreign influence, Nagasaki has always been a worldly city. It's also a resilient one. The inhabitants bounced back from bloody religious persecution in the 1600s, and crushing oppression under the 17th- and 18th-century shoguns. And somehow the city rose anew from the ashes of a nuclear holocaust.

WELCOME AND GOOD WILL

As an American visitor, I was concerned that the local citizenry would be hostile to a son of the nation that dropped the bomb on them.

But at no time during my week in Nagasaki did I detect so much as a flicker of ill will. There might well have been some residual bitterness, of course. But the Japanese abhor confrontation and are famously polite to gaijin, as foreigners are called, so any animosity was kept tightly under wraps.

I speak only a half-dozen rudimentary Japanese phrases, and couldn't decipher the language's written symbols to save my life, yet never have I found foreign travel easier than in Japan. Every time I was baffled by a bus schedule or the cryptic runes on a road sign, some sympathetic local would notice my bewilderment and approach within seconds to offer assistance.

American tourists are sufficiently scarce in Nagasaki that encountering one still seems a novelty for many Japanese. It was not unusual for me to be approached on street corners - shyly, accompanied by prodigious bowing - and asked if I would mind engaging in conversation. Three times in a single afternoon I was asked by groups of giggling Japanese schoolgirls if they might practice their halting English on me.

One of these groups, on a field trip to Nagasaki from the distant city of Gifu, hailed me in a flurry of peace signs, then presented me with a handmade "peace message." Inside its paper covers, a girl named Sachiko had written, "Thousands of peoples lost their life when the bomb was thrown on Nagasaki. That's why Peace I'm hoping for. I don't want war to come again."

A SURVIVOR'S MEMORIES

The bomb continues to resonate most forcefully, of course, for those who felt its wrath firsthand - as Katsuji Yoshida did. A dapper, silver-haired man with a wiry build and sparkling eyes, Yoshida was 13 years old when the bomb exploded half a mile from where he stood.

In left profile, he appears unmarked by the blast. From the other side, however, the story of the apocalypse is writ large on Yoshida's countenance: The entire right half of his face is a matrix of purplish scar tissue and disfigured flesh.

During a visit arranged by the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace, Yoshida says that Aug. 9, 1945, dawned humid and overcast, although by midmorning the sun was beginning to burn through the scud. Wisps of clouds drifted languidly over the harbor. Air-raid sirens had wailed through the city earlier in the morning, but when no B-29s materialized, an "all clear" was sounded.

Young Yoshida exited a community bomb shelter and started walking back to school with six fellow students.

Halfway there, the boys stopped to draw a drink of water from a roadside well.

THE BLINDING FLASH

"For no particular reason," Yoshida recalls, speaking through an interpreter, "I looked up after I finished drinking and noticed two parachutes floating down through an opening in the clouds to my right. Then there was a blinding flash, the sky filled with fire, and I was hurled across the road into a rice paddy.

"In that instant, time seemed to slow down, like in a dream. I remember very clearly the sensation of flying through the air, my body curling against the intense heat, the impact of slamming into the ground. When I regained consciousness, I looked down at my arms and saw that the skin had peeled off in sheets. It hung from my fingertips like a torn shirt. The exposed flesh was bright red with blood, but strangely there was no pain, not at first.

"In shock, I told myself it was just a minor burn, that a little tincture of ammonia would cure everything. Then I noticed all the people staggering down from the surrounding hillsides, groaning and screaming, small children crying for their parents, everyone begging for water, people charred so badly that it was impossible to tell men from women. The Urakami River was choked with the corpses of people and animals.

`I FEEL SO RELIEVED'

"Two students about my age passed by; one had broken both his legs and was being carried by the other, whose eyeballs hung down onto his cheeks. Most of his skin had been burned away. I could see the veins pulsing in his exposed muscles. Realizing my friends and I were nearby, he declared, `I feel so relieved,' and then collapsed dead on the ground. Fifty years later, the sight of those two students is branded vividly in my memory."

Having survived the blast, Yoshida spent more than a year recuperating in hospitals and endured 13 operations.

Upon finally returning to Nagasaki, he tells me, "my disfigured face attracted stares and made children cry. For many years, I stayed inside my home because I was ashamed to go outside. I have also suffered many serious health problems from the radiation."

Yoshida confesses that "at first I hated Americans for what they did to me. I didn't understand how any nation could use such a cruel weapon on human beings. But in my old age I have learned that holding a grudge does nobody any good. I no longer hate Americans. I only hate war."

Jon Krakauer writes for Smithsonian, National Geographic, Outside, Playboy and other magazines. His most recent book, "Into The Wild," will be published in August by Villard/Random House.