Nagasaki Peace Park

At the northern end of Nagasaki, close to where the atomic bomb detonated on 9 August 1945, the Peace Park was built as a place to mourn the dead and to pray that such a weapon is never used again. Its best-known section, the Negai no Zone – the "Zone of Wishes" – is centred on one of the most recognisable monuments in Japan: the great Peace Statue.

The statue is the work of Nagasaki-born sculptor Kitamura Seibo, completed in 1955. Nearly ten metres tall and cast in some thirty tonnes of bronze, it strikes a pose whose every part carries meaning, spelled out by the sculptor on the plinth behind it: the right hand points to the sky and the threat of the bomb, the outstretched left hand signifies peace, and the gently closed eyes offer a prayer for the souls of the victims. In front of it stretches the ceremony plaza, where the city holds its Peace Memorial Ceremony each year on 9 August, the anniversary of the bombing.

Just before the statue lies the Fountain of Peace (1969), dedicated to the victims who died crying out for water after the blast. Nearby stands the Bell of Nagasaki, raised in 1977 in memory of those who died here; at the time of the bombing this area held munitions factories where mobilised students and schoolgirls worked, and many of them were among the dead. A surviving fragment of wall from the former Urakami branch of Nagasaki Prison, which stood at the hypocentre, remains on the site as well.

What makes the park distinctive is that its message is a global one, written by many hands. Ringing the grounds is a collection of monuments donated by countries all over the world in support of Nagasaki's "World Peace Symbol Zone", each an artist's meditation on peace from a different culture. There are mother-and-child figures from the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and Italy; a marble maiden from China; a stainless-steel "Cloak of Peace" from New Zealand; works from Bulgaria, Brazil, Cuba, Turkey, Poland, Portugal, Argentina, Germany, and the United States; and, more recently, a "Tree of Life" from Aboriginal communities in Australia. Together they turn the park into a kind of international gallery, a chorus of voices saying the same thing in many visual languages.

It is a place to walk slowly. The statuary, the fountain, and the ceremony plaza are meant less as sights to tick off than as an invitation to reflect – on what happened here, and on the hope the whole park is built around.