The Shinkansen - better known as the bullet train - runs almost the entire length of Japan and it is fast, very fast. The doors slide closed, the electric motors start to hum and it begins to slide its way out of the station. As the buildings and topography begin to slide past at a continually increasing rate you wonder whether it'll ever stop accelerating. It's fast, but also remarkably smooth - there isn't the faintest hint of a clickety-clack - only a slight wobble as the 16 carriages of a northbound Shinkansen flash past at (a relative) 550km/hr. As we streamed away from Osaka the countryside opened up: flat farmed fields between a multitude of green hills and mountains. Approaching Kyushu, the peaks became hidden in mist and rain blattered against the windows. Alas the Shinkansen stops at Hakata in Kyshu and the express to Nagasaki seemed interminably slow. Nagasaki itself nestles between the surrounding hills and the sea - but will forever sit in the shadow of the cloud that formed over it on August 9th, 1945.

Before that day, Nagasaki already had history. For centuries it was the only Japanese city allowed contact with the west and both trade and ideas trickled in and out of Nagasaki. Japan's first telephone line was laid here and some of the architecture from the foreign enclaves in Nagasaki around that time has been preserved. They look a little out of place and are furnished inside with items brought all the way from home (from cutlery to pianos). The photos revealed something I had not thought about - that there were a good deal of European children here too, all going to the same school. How strange it must have been to grow up in a small community so different from the country that engulfed it.

My last stop was a small black monolith, just north of the city centre. I looked up and tried to imagine what happened half a kilometre above and 55 years ago. It is hard to say how I felt when I left the nearby Atomic Bomb museum. It had been unusually quiet - even for a museum. People moved about in silence. The exhibits had made everything all too real. Twisted girders, melted glass bottles, piles of coins fused together. But worst of all, the terrible, terrible photographs of a land of rubble, bent metal and charred bodies. All the overwhelming facts and statistics did not have the impact of just one of those pictures. The memories of Nagasaki will stay with me long after I leave.