Carl Stearns Clancy, the first round-the-world biker, whose route we were retracing 100 years on, emerged on deck as his ship docked in Nagasaki, breathed in the salt sea air, and almost certainly grinned with pleasure to see, as his Henderson was lowered onto the dockside, a sight he had not seen for some time: roads.

Around him as he motored north to Tokyo was a country more delightful, beautiful, peculiar and above all different to anything he had ever seen, particularly the quaint habit of locals to dash out of their homes and into the road when they heard his horn, thinking it meant the arrival of the fried fish salesman, the pipe cleaner or the clog mender.

Still, apart from kamikaze pedestrians, rickshaws and carts, he had the roads to himself, since he saw no motorcycles and only a single car in his whole time in Japan. It is, as you can imagine, much the same today.

As our plane touched down at Nagasaki, I felt that curious mixture of fear and excitement I had felt the previous time I visited Japan: fear because it is the most alien place on the planet, and excitement because it is also the most fascinating.

We had arrived in Nagasaki just too late for cherry blossom season, that time of year when the petals come fluttering down to remind the Japanese of the fragile, temporary beauty of life.

Sudden, apocalyptic end
But then, the city itself is an even greater reminder of the fragility of life. When Portuguese traders sailed into Nagasaki harbour in 1570, it was the start of 375 years of relatively benign association with the West. That came to a sudden, apocalyptic end on a summer's day in 1945.

On the morning of August 9th, the 240,000 citizens of Nagasaki woke to a warm but overcast day, and were glad when the clouds parted at 11am to reveal just enough blue sky to make a sailor
suit.

They shouldn't have been glad, because at that moment the crew of the B-29 Superfortress Bockscar, having found their planned target of Kokura obscured by cloud, saw Nagasaki through the same gap in the clouds and dropped their bomb on the city from 30,000 feet.

In three seconds, around 40,000 people died and one-third of the city was destroyed. The final death toll was put at more than 50,000.

As in Auschwitz, with its locks of hair, its shoes and suitcases, it is the small human details in the city’s Atomic Bomb Museum that are the most poignant, like a schoolgirl’s lunchbox, her name and class number still visible on the lid and the rice inside as charred as the bread from Pompeii which Clancy had seen in Naples.

It is remarkable that since Clancy rode through here we have come on in leaps and bounds technologically, but not moved an inch in terms of morality.

Beauty of detail
But then, we emerged into glorious sunshine and bought two cones from an old ice-cream seller, and in a few deft scoops she created what looked like two perfect roses almost too beautiful to eat. She handed them to us with a polite bow, and in that moment I was reminded again why I love Japan: for the infinitely loving care given to the beauty of detail in everything, from bathing and the tying of a kimono to the tea ceremony.

Add up all the smiles and lightened hearts those small acts of love and beauty create, and you may well have a critical mass greater than that of any atomic bomb.

Next week: California