Nagasaki was not the primary intended target on August 9; Kokura was. Kokura was a smaller city. The exact intended target was Kokura Arsenal, the biggest arms factory in western Japan, which produced missiles, aircraft, and weaponry for the army, and also chemical weapons. Some 57,000 people would have been killed by a blast there, it was estimated in Japan.
But there was cloud cover, including from a previous incendiary attack.
Nagasaki was the backup site, not because of civilian population, which was on the south side of the city, but because of the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works north of that, and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Torpedo Works even further north.
Decades after the attacks, there is a saying in Japan about the reporting on the anniversaries of the events: “sakebi Hiroshima, inori no Nagasaki” — “shouting Hiroshima, praying Nagasaki.”
Why praying Nagasaki?
Because there is a directly religious connection which emerged after the Nagasaki bombing.
At the last moment in the clouds over Nagasaki, intending to drop the much more complex plutonium bomb, “Fat Man,” on a radar fix, the bombardier caught a brief glimpse of land and dropped Fat Man.
Intended for the Mitsubishi arsenal targets, the bomb missed by over a mile and hit squarely over the Catholic suburb of Uragami.
The Uragami cathedral, which could hold 5,000 Catholics, burst into flames at midnight that night and was consumed.
Urakami was where secret Christians had historically assembled, but were discovered in the 1860s and jailed. US President Ulysses S. Grant demanded these Christians be released for a simple reason — that a nation that did not respect religious freedom could not be considered “enlightened.” The freed farmers then built Urakami Cathedral.
But how did Nagasaki become “inori no Nagasaki,” “praying Nagasaki”? The book A Song for Nagasaki tells us.
In a testimonial on the back cover, Shusako Endo, himself a Catholic convert from atheism, writes, “Christians and non-Christians alike were deeply moved by [Dr. Takashi] Nagai’s faith in Christ that made him like Job of the Scriptures: in the midst of the nuclear wilderness he kept his heart in tranquility and peace, neither bearing resentment against any man nor cursing God.’ ”
Nagai was a physician, the head of radiology at a hospital, and already weak and suffering from radiation exposure. At his hospital the morning of the bomb, he was spared. Returning to his home, he found the ashes of his wife. His children had left for a distant point in the mountains and were spared. He continued his work at his own peril, gradually declining, then bed-ridden, where he continued his writing. His book The Bells of Nagasaki is well known in Japan, and the movie that followed. The praying memorial in Nagasaki is taken from the influence of Dr. Nagai.
Here is what he once delivered in a speech to his fellow residents, taken from A Song for Nagasaki:
“I have heard that the atom bomb… was destined for another city. Heavy clouds rendered that target impossible, and the American crew headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki. Then a mechanical problem arose, and the bomb was dropped further north than planned and burst right above the cathedral… It was not the American crew, I believe, who chose our suburb. God’s Providence chose Urakami and carried the bomb right above our homes. Is there not a profound relationship between the annihilation of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?
“We are inheritors of Adam’s sin… of Cain’s sin. He killed his brother. Yes, we have forgotten we are God’s children. We have turned to idols and forgotten love. Hating one another, killing one another, joyfully killing one another! At last the evil and horrific conflict came to an end, but mere repentance was not enough for peace… We had to offer a stupendous sacrifice… Cities had been leveled. But even that was no enough… Only this hansai [holocaust] on His altar… so that many millions of lives might be saved.
“How noble, how splendid, was that holocaust of midnight August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling darkness and bringing the light of peace [the emperor is said to have given his agreement in Tokyo for peace at the exact time the Urakami cathedral burst into flames]. In the very depths of our grief, we were able to gaze up to something beautiful, pure, and sublime.
“Happy are those who weep; they shall be comforted. We must walk the way of reparation… ridiculed, whipped, punished for our crimes, sweaty and bloody. But we can turn our minds to Jesus carrying his Cross up the hill to Calvary… The Lord has given; the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Let us be thankful that Nagasaki was chosen for the whole burnt sacrifice! Let us be thankful that through this sacrifice, peace was granted to the world and religious freedom to Japan.”
The Nagai museum now stands beside the bare one-room hut, named Nyokodo, where Nagai was moved in the spring of 1948. He was known as the Ghandi of Nyokodo.
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The Priests Who Survived the Atomic Bomb
My attention has also been drawn to an interesting report by Donal Anthony Foley in England’s Catholic Herald on August 5, which recounts the remarkable survival of the Jesuit Fathers in Hiroshima and which connects the bombing with the story of Fatima. Here are excerpts:
By Donal Anthony Foley on Thursday, 5 August 2010
This Friday, August 6, will see the Feast of the Transfiguration celebrated in the Church. It commemorates the occasion when Christ, accompanied by Peter, James, and John, went up a high mountain – traditionally identified with Mount Tabor in Galilee – and was there “transfigured” before them, so that “his face shone like the sun, and his garments became as white as light” (Mt 17:2).
The Greek word for transfiguration is metemorphothe, from which we get the word “metamorphosis”. So the Transfiguration was a complete and stunning change in the appearance of Jesus… Its purpose was to prepare them for the reality of the crucifixion, so that having once seen – in some sense – his divinity, they would be strengthened in their faith.
August 6 is also an important date in world history: the fateful day on which the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan. On that day, a Monday, at 8.15 in the morning, an American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, dropped its bomb “Little Boy”, which… vaporised practically everything and everyone within a radius of about a mile of the point of impact…
But in the midst of this terrible carnage, something quite remarkable happened: there was a small community of Jesuit Fathers living in a presbytery near the parish church, which was situated less than a mile away from detonation point, well within the radius of total devastation. And all eight members of this community escaped virtually unscathed from the effects of the bomb. Their presbytery remained standing, while the buildings all around, virtually as far as the eye could see, were flattened.
Fr Hubert Schiffer, a German Jesuit, was one of these survivors, aged 30 at the time of the explosion, and who lived to the age of 63 in good health. In later years he travelled to speak of his experience, and this is his testimony as recorded in 1976, when all eight of the Jesuits were still alive. On August 6 1945, after saying Mass, he had just sat down to breakfast when there was a bright flash of light.
Since Hiroshima had military facilities, he assumed there must have been some sort of explosion at the harbour, but almost immediately he recounted: “A terrific explosion filled the air with one bursting thunderstroke. An invisible force lifted me from the chair, hurled me through the air, shook me, battered me [and] whirled me round and round…” He raised himself from the ground and looked around, but could see nothing in any direction. Everything had been devastated.
He had a few quite minor injuries, but nothing serious, and indeed later examinations at the hands of American army doctors and scientists showed that neither he nor his companions had suffered ill-effects from radiation damage or the bomb. Along with his fellow Jesuits, Fr Schiffer believed “that we survived because we were living the message of Fatima. We lived and prayed the rosary daily in that home”…
After this first bombing, the Japanese government refused to surrender unconditionally, and so a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki three days later on August 9. Nagasaki had actually been the secondary target, but cloud cover over the primary target, Kokura, saved it from obliteration on the day. The supreme irony is that Nagasaki was the city where two-thirds of the Catholics in Japan were concentrated, and so after centuries of persecution they suffered this terrible blow right at the end of the war.
But in a strange parallel to what happened at Hiroshima, the Franciscan Friary established by St Maximilian Kolbe in Nagasaki before the war was likewise unaffected by the bomb which fell there. St Maximilian, who was well-known for his devotion to the Blessed Virgin, had decided to go against the advice he had been given to build his friary in a certain location. When the bomb was dropped, the friary was protected from the force of the bomb by an intervening mountain. So both at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can see Mary’s protective hand at work.
The apparitions at Fatima in Portugal took place in 1917, when from May to October three young children, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, and their cousin, Lucia dos Santos, saw the Blessed Virgin six times, culminating in the “miracle of the sun” on October 13, when 70,000 people saw the sun spin in the sky and change colour successively, before falling to the earth in a terrifying manner. Many of those present thought it was the end of the world, but the sun reassumed its place in the sky to great cries of relief.
The essence of the Fatima message concerns conversion from sin and a return to God, and involves reparation for one’s own sins and the sins of others, as well as the offering up of one’s daily sufferings and trials. There was also a focus on prayer and the Eucharist at Fatima, and particularly the rosary, as well as the Five First Saturdays devotion, which involves Confession, Holy Communion, the rosary and meditation, for five consecutive months with the intention of making reparation to Our Lady (for more details visit Theotokos.org.uk).
It’s interesting to reflect, then, on the theme of “transfiguration” which links these various events. Christ’s face shone like the sun on Mount Tabor, and at Fatima, Our Lady worked the great miracle of the sun to convince the huge crowd which had gathered there that the message she was giving to mankind was authentic. Consider, too, that the poor people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered as man-made “suns” exploded in their midst causing horrific devastation. But at Hiroshima the eight Jesuits, who were living the message of Fatima, and particularly the daily rosary, were somehow “transfigured,” protected by God’s divine power, from the terrible effects of the bomb.
Surely there is a message here for all of us, that living the message of Fatima, in a world which grows ever more dangerous, and which is still threatened by nuclear war, is as profound a necessity for us as it was for Fr Schiffer and his companions.
