Sandy Curnow Reflection

Bells of Nagasaki

Image: Our Lady the Hibakusha, A Story of two cathedrals (www.catholicworker.org)

This Sunday is the Feast of the Exaltation of the True Cross, which occurred some 300 years after the crucifixion. In Christ’s time it was an instrument of torture mostly reserved for slaves, or Jewish rebels; images of the cross and, more awful, that of the crucified figure of Christ, were hidden in shame for hundreds of years. Christians were loath to display them. In a parallel way today, it is important to acknowledge some other events we feel are in the past, and prefer not to celebrate; last month August 9th was the 80th anniversary of the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki,  recalling the 70,000 people who died that day, and in addition the destruction (and renewal) of the catholic cathedral 500 m from the bomb’s epicentre.  Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan; it has been noted that a country of 74 million Christians – as US was in 1945 – killed two thirds of the 12,000 Catholics who lived in Nagasaki – even using the twin towers of the first cathedral as navigation references to achieve maximum impact. The most moving image of Mary – above – is what survived from a life-sized statue of Our Lady found in the blasted ruin. 

Image: Scene of the Memorial Service held at the Urakami Roman Catholic Cathedral Nagasaki. From a public notice on site nearby.

The ruins of the old cathedral on an ancient sacred site, are about to be pulled down to make way for a replacement church.

We should never forget. 

The story of Japan’s Hidden Christians is a wholly unlikely one that goes back to 1542 and the arrival in Kyushu in Western Japan of St Francis Xavier, one of the first Jesuits. In the early years he and his fellow missionaries were hugely successful. Hundreds, indeed, thousands, from both ruling and working classes in western Japan were converted to Catholicism and practised their religion openly for many decades. (Other commentators have noted that the gunpowder and weapons the Portuguese sailors and merchants brought with them as part of the package were also most acceptable to war lords.) However, European Christianity posed problems for a completely different culture. Sympathy for slaves shocked a Japanese society that was becoming increasingly socially stratified. More importantly, Catholicism, which had entered Japan with Francis Xavier under the protection of the King of Portugal was inevitably linked to European colonial aspirations across Asia – Goa, the Spice Islands and especially in the Philippines. Japan wanted no part of colonial interests.  Within Japanese society, some enthusiastic converts were encouraged to burn down Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines because they were not of the True Religion; these enthusiasts were unaware that they were just figures caught in political cross-play between powerful family and religious groups within Japan. Finally, Japan’s response was to reject all foreign influence, religious and commercial.  

And so, forty odd years after their first arrival, missionaries were prohibited, and in 1597 a more serious banning edict was proclaimed and 26 Christians in Nagasaki were crucified as a warning to others. Japan by 1612 was determined to resist all foreign influences and unify the country. It was completely closed to all foreigners.  Under the Tokugawa Shogunate any practice of Christianity was forbidden and a subsequent rebellion led to the execution of thousands of Catholics to ensure that the religion was completely stamped out. After the 1630s only tiny groups of Hidden Christians continued to practise in secret.

Japan was opened again to trade by the 1850s, and Catholic priests were again allowed to build a church – but strictly for merchants from other countries. For Japanese, Christianity was still banned. However, on March 17, 1865, a small group of hidden Christian women entered the newly constructed and consecrated Oura Church in Nagasaki. They asked the French priest, Father Petitjean, who was praying his noon prayers at the time, “Where is the statue of Santa Maria?” They then whispered: “All of us have the same heart as you.”  The stunned missionary priest discovered that, after 250 years of isolation, there were roughly 15,000 underground Catholics across the Nagasaki region.

Image: The relief of the discovery of hidden Christians – Oura Cathedral (https://christian-nagasaki.jp/en/stories/11.html)

They ‘hid’ their religion in a number of ways, chiefly by masking their practice by adapting it to Shinto or Buddhist ways, especially images. The Virgin and Child often looked like a Buddhist female figure with a tiny infant somewhere in its lap.  The figures below have tiny openings at the back in which to conceal a miniature rosary.

Image: Statues used by the hidden Christians to practice their religion in secret (Christianity https://www.japan-guide.com)

Image: Maria Kannon (our Lady) figures Courtesy Sophia University Tokyo. Chelsea Foxwell, “’Merciful Mother Kannon’ and Its Audiences,” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 1, 2010), 331.

Illegal to be made in Japan, these adapted figures of Our Lady were mixed with other statuary and imported from Fujian Province in China.

Following the Meiji Restoration, the ban on Christianity was rescinded, and religious freedom was promulgated in 1873   Many of these Hidden Christians were poor fishermen but once more allowed to worship openly, they managed to build a Catholic cathedral by 1925 on the site where Catholics had been crucified in 1597.

Image: Urakami Cathedral, Nagasaki

It lasted only 20 years until that appalling day in August 1945 when the Hidden Catholics cathedral was completely destroyed. Later, one of its bells was found in the shattered rubble and was restored and re-hung in the new cathedral in 1957. 

Like the cathedral, Nagasaki gradually re-built but never forgot the horror of atomic weapons. For many years now, on the 9^th day of every month a bell in the Peace Park has rung out at exactly 11.02 to remind the city and to warn the world about the terrible suffering that nuclear weapons cause. Survivors of the burns, and the sickness caused, and of the social isolation that these victims endured, are there. This last August the 9^th – the 80^th anniversary – was different again. There were the crowds of white and gold wreaths and dignitaries from across the world praying for a non-nuclear peace.  And there was the voice of the Peace Park bell, and not one but two bells calling in response from the Cathedral, all at 11.02.

Once again, this is a very moving story of memory rather than forgetting. 

In America the grandson of a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project (the research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons) wanted to make some small amends for August 9^th. James Nolan Jr, a professor of sociology at Williams College, Massachusetts, raised $125,000 in just over a year to pay for the new bell, prompted by the suggestion of Kojiro Moriuchi, a parishioner of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and the son of a survivor of the bombing on 9 August 1945. Hundreds of Americans he contacted contributed this sum for a new bell to partner the one that had survived. 

The engraving on it repeated the one that was destroyed “I sing to God with a constant ringing in the place where so many Japanese martyrs with honour have worshipped and have, by their example, called their brothers and sisters and their descendants to the fellowship of the true faith and of heaven.”

In the cathedral, a mass was being said, specially timed so that at 11.02 there could be a two-minute pause for memorial silence for priest and congregation. In 1945 three priests were hearing confessions and a few parishioners were saying the rosary when the bomb detonated. They were among the 8,000 Catholics who died instantly.  In 2025 thousands around the world pray for peace.

And those who know their story wonder at the extraordinary fidelity of the Hidden Christians who, having heard Francis Xavier and his fellow missionaries from 1550s for the next few decades, held a faith in Christianity for well over 250 years in secret, and in the face of terrible persecution. If the bells speak of memory, the battered old one and the remembrance-laden new one speak of a message almost as powerful as the one in Peace Park.

We should always remember.

By Sandy Curnow