Nagasaki Takashi Nagai Memorial Museum

Introduction

Takashi Nagai was a physician at Nagasaki Medical College who lost his wife in the 1945 atomic bombing and was himself exposed while treating the injured. He spent the years that followed living with leukaemia, writing on radiation sickness and appealing for peace, and died in 1951. The memorial museum opened in 2000 in the Urakami Ueno neighbourhood where he lived, beside the two-tatami hut called Nyokodo, 'love your neighbour as yourself' from the Gospel; there he raised his two children and wrote The Bells of Nagasaki, Leave These Children Behind, The Rosary Chain and River of Life. The first of these, The Bells of Nagasaki (長崎の鐘), was made into both a film and a record. The first-floor gallery holds his belongings, manuscripts, calligraphy and photographs, with a five-minute film on his life and English, Chinese and Korean audio available at the desk; the second floor is a free reading room. The division of labour with the Atomic Bomb Museum is clear: that one explains the instant and the destruction of a city, this one shows how a single person lived and wrote through the six years afterwards, which is why visiting both in one day carries such weight. The gallery fee rose from JPY 100 to JPY 200 on 1 April 2026, with students still free, so the widely quoted JPY 100 is out of date. It opens 09:00-17:00 almost every day except the New Year period, five minutes from the Genbaku-Shiryokan tram stop, and fits a half-day Urakami route with Peace Park, the hypocentre and Urakami Cathedral.

✨ Highlights

🛈 Practical Info