After the bombing, Dr Takashi Nagai — a Catholic doctor and radiologist already dying of leukaemia from his medical work — built himself a two-tatami-mat hut and lived there in voluntary poverty until his death in 1951. He wrote a series of bestselling books from this hut, including The Bells of Nagasaki, which gave the world its first serious account of the bombing from the ground. The tiny wooden hermitage still stands and a small adjoining museum tells his story. It is a quiet, deeply moving counterpoint to the official memorials a few hundred metres south.