journal features

nagasaki is beautiful

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Nagasaki, 2024.09.28

I decided last night that I would run off to Nagasaki. I hadn't been to the city or prefecture before, and I've long since wanted to for a variety of reasons: I'm trying to get to all the prefectures, eventually; Nagasaki is a particularly beautiful place, being hilly without being a desolate mess; and it has the famous gunkanjima ruins.

The first thing I did upon arrival was look up somewhere that would give me a view of the city. The second thing I did was remember that I didn't bring my camera's spare battery for this trip, so I had to be careful with my use of my actual camera. So I started using my Googly Phone while in the city, sadly.

So this is Nagasaki

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)