On arrival in Kokura one December day, the skies are dark and threaten a storm. It’s little surprise as the town, now embedded within the industrial megacity of Kitakyushu, sees cloudy conditions over half the days of the year.
And during World War II, such weather saved the city from nuclear destruction.
Hiroshima had always been the primary target for the first atomic bomb, as it was home to two Imperial Japanese Army headquarters and a strategic port. Originally scheduled for Aug. 11, the second atomic bomb targeting the city’s Kokura Arsenal, a conventional and chemical weapons production center, was rescheduled to Aug. 9 due to a forecasted storm and poor flying conditions.
On Aug. 9, the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, served as the weather recon plane for the mission. The crew reported clear skies over the target cities, but when the bomb-carrying plane, Bockscar, arrived over Kokura, the target was shrouded in clouds. This may have been caused by lingering fires from the previous night’s fire bombings of the nearby town of Yahata, one of Japan’s largest steel manufacturers. Years later, a former steel worker claimed that the plant burned coal tar to produce a thick black smoke that would obscure the city from American bombers.
Under orders to rely solely on visual confirmation of the target, the Bockscar crew circled Kokura three times with the plane’s bomb bay doors open, waiting for a break in the clouds. As fuel ran low, the crew decided to proceed to the alternate target — Nagasaki — which was also clouded over. Unlike Kokura, however, this city’s luck did not hold: Shortly before 10:58 a.m., the clouds broke, and the bomb was released.
In the years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both cities have recovered, even becoming tourist destinations not in spite of but because of their wartime destruction. In particular, a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is a uniquely sobering reminder of the fallout — justified or not — of total war.
In equal fashion, a walk through the streets of Kokura, a city spared atomic destruction by sheer circumstance, is eye-opening not only as a what-if for all that would have been destroyed but as an indirect example of all that was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
During my visit to the northern Kyushu city, the strength of the wind was a concern as were the occasional bursts of sleet. I find a windbreak in Mekaru Shrine, where I sit and watch sea traffic bobbing in the high swells beyond Moji Port. I then pass through Norfolk Square, admiring the intricate patterns of kudzu spider-webbing over the vintage warehouses that served as windbreaks of their own.
These vines lead me to the Mojiko Retro district and its atmospheric collection of late-19th-century buildings clad in Western-style red brick. The compact size of Mojiko Retro allows for an easy visit to its attractions, many of which have been repurposed as art galleries, including the Former Moji Customs House and the Former Osaka Shosen Building, whose 1919 octangular tower is a prominent feature of the town.
The Former Moji Mitsui Club is a testament to the wealth that the area once brought in. Its interiors represent the height of European chic in the 1920s and once played host to opulent guests such as Albert Einstein and novelist Fumiko Hayashi, both memorialized in exhibits within. The most stunning structure must surely be the Dalian Friendship Memorial Building, a lesson in the varieties of geometry, despite its more recent construction to commemorate the historic trade routes between the port and the Asian continent.
Though tempted by the many eateries within Kaikyo Plaza across the street, I decide on a local craft beer and a yaki karē (baked curry rice), a signature dish of northern Kyushu since 1950. A neighboring shop boasts of its banana beer, brewed to celebrate the unique sales pitches of banana sellers hocking the fruit upon its import from the colony of Taiwan into Meiji Era (1868-1912) Japan. A postbox brandishing bananas serves as a further memorial.
I cross the road to the atmospheric Mojiko Station, built in 1914 and the first station to be designated a national treasure, in part to its former role as the headquarters of the Kyushu Railway company. A 30-minute ride brings me to the center of Kokura and Kokura Castle, burned by internecine samurai violence in 1866 but rebuilt in ferroconcrete in 1959. Next door, the site of the former Kokura Arsenal, slated for would-be atomic destruction, now holds Katsuyama Park — completed in 1973 with a poignant centerpiece: a bell taken from the ruined Urakami Cathedral that marked the epicenter of the Nagasaki bombing.
A memorial ceremony is held here annually on Aug. 9, and a peace museum was opened in an adjacent corner of the park in 2022.
I choose to overnight back in Moji Port, stunning at night as the light plays off the brick and the water. I ponder the irony of how this old port once spearheaded the economic drive into Asia, modeled on European colonizers, before itself morphing horribly into colonization — a strange taste of the as-yet unknown yet popular in the postwar period phrase, “Kokura no un ga aru” (“Kokura’s luck”): a disaster averted without even the awareness of it about to happen.
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