“The first light of the morning makes the crickets chirp. Kayano stirs in my arms; instinctively his little hands search my chest. But when, still half asleep, he realizes that it is not the soft, sweet breast of his mother, he starts crying and, still in tears, he goes back to sleep. We are not the only ones hit by the terrible situation. In the immense desert of the atomic bomb, how many half-hidden sobs, in the silence of the night, shake the chest of so many other widows and widowers and orphans like us…”
This is how Dr. Takashi Nagai describes the awakening of his family in the aftermath of the atomic bombing in his bestseller book, The Bells of Nagasaki (1951). His children had survived, but he had gathered himself the small heap of ashes that was what remained of his wife Maria Midori Nagai, together with her rosary beads, surprisingly intact.
On the morning of August 9, 1945, Dr. Takashi Nagai was working in his office at the medical center in Nagasaki, Japan. At 11 am, he saw a flash of blinding light, followed by darkness and a crashing roar. In that moment, his world collapsed around him. It was the explosion of the second plutonium-fuelled atomic bomb five hundred yards over the Urakami Cathedral of Nagasaki. The first, a little time before, had fallen over the town of Hiroshima.
After escaping from the rubble and receiving treatment for a severed carotid artery, Nagai joined the rest of the hospital staff in treating the survivors. Given the force and heat of the blast, he imagined that such a big bomb must have killed hundreds of people. Only gradually did the extent of the destruction become clear. The bomb had killed nearly eighty thousand persons, and wounded many more.
THE CHOSEN VICTIM
As Robert Ellsberg writes in his profile The Mystic of Nagasaki: “Nagai witnessed scenes of horrifying suffering. The intense heat near the epicenter of the blast had vaporized humans, leaving only the outline of their shadows. Hordes of blackened survivors, the skin hanging from their arms, desperately wandered the streets crying for water.
Such circumstances might naturally prompt a range of reactions − madness, despair, or hunger for revenge. But in the days following the explosion, Nagai, a devout Catholic, instead, expressed a most unexpected attitude − namely, gratitude to God that his Catholic city had been chosen to atone for the sins of humanity.”
In arriving at this perspective, Nagai undoubtedly responded with the strong consciousness of Nagasaki’s Christian population. Since the time of the early Jesuit missions, the city had been the center of Japanese Catholicism, and consequently the scene of extensive martyrdom. Over time, Japanese Catholics had claimed a deep identification with the cross of Christ and a conviction that atonement must come only at the price of blood. Thus, it seemed natural for Nagai to pose the question: “Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole burned offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?”
The same perspective inspired the scene of Jesus speaking to the imprisoned missionary, in the novel Silence (1966) of Sushaku Endo. Jesus appears not as the beautiful, haloed and serene Christ of the missionary’s devotions, but the Christ of the twisted and dented fumie (the images of the face of Jesus used by the persecutors to force the Christians to step on), the trampled upon, and suffering Christ. And what Christ says to the priest shocks him to the marrow: “Trample on me, trample…It was to be trampled upon by men that I was born into the world; it was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
Nagai found remarkable that the bomb had been dropped that day on Nagasaki, as a result of heavy clouds obscuring the originally intended city. As a further result of clouds, the pilot had not fixed his target on the Mitsubishi iron works, as intended, but instead on the Catholic Cathedral of the Urakami district of the city, home to the majority of Nagasaki’s Catholics. He noted moreover that the end of the war came on August 15, feast of the Assumption of Mary, to whom the cathedral was dedicated. All this was deeply meaningful. “We must ask if this convergence of events − the ending of the war and the celebration of her feast − was merely coincidental or if there was here some mysterious providence of God.”
Nagai expressed these sentiments in an open-air requiem Mass just days after the bombing. While his views were controversial, he provided consolation to many of the city Catholic survivors, desperate to find some redemptive meaning in their terrible suffering: “We have disobeyed the law of love. Cheerfully we have hated one another and killed one another. And now, at last, we have brought this great and evil war to an end. But in order to restore peace to the world, it was not sufficient to repent. We had to obtain God’s pardon through the offering of a great sacrifice… Let us give thanks that Nagasaki was chosen for the sacrifice… May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”
A WITNESS OF PEACE
Nagai was himself a convert. Born on January 3, 1908, he became a Catholic in 1934. His conversion was prompted by several influences, especially the example of his fiancée, who belonged to an ancient Catholic family. Nagai pursued a career in medicine, ultimately entering the field of radiology. In 1941, he was found to be suffering from incurable leukemia, induced by his exposure to x-rays. Nevertheless, he was able to continue his work, and in 1945 he had become the head of radiology at the University of Nagasaki.
In the aftermath of the bombing on August 9, Nagai attended tirelessly to the medical needs of the survivors. “Each life was precious. For all these people, the body was a precious treasure.” The effects of radiation, combined with his previous illness, left Nagai an invalid, barely able to leave his bed. He lived as a contemplative in a small hut near the cathedral ruins in Urakami, writing books and receiving visitors. Increasingly he came to believe that Nagasaki had been chosen not only to atone for the sins of the war, but also to bear witness to the cause of international peace.
“Men and women of the world, never again plan war! From this atomic waste, the people of Nagasaki confront the world and cry out: No more war! Let us follow the commandment of love and work together. The people of Nagasaki prostrate themselves before God and pray: Grant that Nagasaki may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world.”
Dr. Nagai died on May 1, 1951, at the age of forty-three.
THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
In the book: The Bells of Nagasaki, Dr. Nagai describes the innocent questions of his children to which he tries to give honest answers: “Does the atom serve only to make bombs?”
“No, there are infinite ways of utilizing that energy, if you don’t make it burst in only one go. If man controls it with his wisdom and makes it explode gradually, he can exploit it to run trains, to sail ships, to fly planes… Humanity has so far passed through the Stone Age, then the bronze, the iron, the coal, the oil and electricity age. And now, starting from this year, it has entered the atomic age. You, Seichi, and you too Kaynano, already belong to the atomic age. My children fell asleep whispering: “Atomic age…Atomic age…”
“Humanity has managed to discover, in the bosom of the earth, this precious sword that God Almighty had hidden and now, with this double-edged sword, what kind of dance will it dance?” Dr Nagai was thinking of the traditional Japanese sword dance.
Then the beautiful conclusion: “And behold the slow pealing of the bells rises from the cathedral over the vast, desert plain, the solemn sound of the morning Angelus. The bells had not broken, falling down in the midst of the ruins from the fifty-meter-high clock tower. Iwanaga and Ichitaro of the Catholic youth had found them still whole and strung them anew on the highest part of the ruined clock tower.
Their sound is spreading over us as a blessing. Seichi and Kayano have opened their eyes and are now praying, kneeling beside their poor beddings. May humanity not experience any other war that would be a suicide! This is what the inhabitants of Urakami are asking God, prostrated on the acidic dust of the atomic bomb. May their city be the last in the world to be made a desert by the atom. No more wars! Seichi and Kayano end now their prayer and sign themselves: In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
