The Catholic Weekly 2 August 2020

catholicweekly.com.au 12 2, August, 2020 FEATURE Franciscan Brother Ozaki Tomei. PHOTO: COURTESY GWYN MCCLELLAND IT IS now 75 years since the United States dropped the second atomic bomb ever used in wartime on Nagasaki, resulting in a death toll of up to 70,000 by the end of 1945. The Hiroshima bombing will be remembered on 6 August and the Nagasaki bombing on 9 August. Of the dead at Nagasaki, approximately 8500 on the day were Catholics represent- ing 60 to 75 per cent of their own community and over 10 per cent of the total. Over the last 12 years, I have studied the immense implications of the Nagasaki bombing on the city’s Catholic community through interviews with sur- vivors, the community and lo- cal researchers. Together with Yuki Miyamoto, an ethicist at Depaul University in Chicago, I have collated some discus- sion about how the 75th anni- versary of the bombing would be impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. In late 2019 I attendedMass with the people of Urakami, a northern suburb of Nagasaki, Catholics who had travelled from around Japan, onlook- ers, and Pope Francis, the sec- ond Pope to visit Japan after John Paul II in 1981. The Mass was celebrat- ed at the baseball ground in Urakami Valley just 200 me- tres from Ground Zero. The evening before, I visited a hot springs overlooking the valley and couldn’t helpbut visualise where the 12 survivors were at 11:02am on 9 August 1945, according to their subsequent interviews. Oral historians write about palpable ‘emotion in the interview.’ As I surveyed the scene, the emotion I had experienced in the interviews welled up deep within. This year, the closing cer- emony of the Olympics was planned for Nagasaki Day, as the nation’s government played up the opportunity to move past adversity into the future. The Olympics are now postponed, perhaps to be ¾ ¾ Dr Gwyn McClelland, cancelled, and the ongoing COVID crisis will have amajor impact on the commemora- tions of the atomic bombings. Today, in Tokyo, coronavirus infections are an ongoing concern. Given the emerging and unexpected situation, to what extent will the COV- ID-19 crisis impact the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Probably partly a result of the Catholic presence there, reactions to the atomic bomb in the Nagasaki community are often summarised by writ- ers as ‘prayer’ and the under- standing of the devastation as God’s ‘providence.’ But my Rising from the ashes Centuries of persecution and, 75 years ago, an atomic bombing, have deeply effected how Nagasaki’s Christians think of themselves and what happened to them. Two popes have had a significant impact on how they make sense of their experience new book argues that Catho- lic atomic bomb survivors of Nagasaki protest the bombing and have complex and cultur- ally specific memories of its impact and aftermath. Based on a collective bi- ography of the 12 survivors, I consider the connections be- tween individuals and their community’s history, and their consciousness of histor- ic communal marginalisation. What became quickly clear as I studied the community of Catholic survivors was that their survival of the bomb was understood in parallel to their community’s astonishing en- durance of 250 years of per- secution which began prior to the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603. Their ancestors were the ‘Hidden Christians’ of Japan who went underground, pre- tending to be Buddhist, in or- der to avoid maltreatment. The decision of the Jap- anese Olympic planners to time the Closing Ceremony for Nagasaki Day had, I be- lieve, ‘dangerous’ implica- tions, even if it was supposed to offer a sense of closure. By remembering the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan would have brought to mind the Catholics devastated there, who were previously mistreated and made an un- derclass due to an Imperialist mindset which demonised the ‘Other’, colonialised and subsumed the nation’s neigh- bours. I use the word ‘dangerous’ (after Johann B. Metz) be- cause memories can disturb, stoke emotions and unleash dangerous new insights about the past. ‘Dangerous’ mem- ories question hegemonic power and those who oppress others for their beliefs. In par- ticular, the subjugated experi- ence such memories as ‘dan- gerous’, subversively resisting the ‘prophets of historyless- ness’, those who adopt ‘vic- tor’s justice’ and who would exclude the vanquished from history. In my study of survivor narratives, I aimed to dis- cover whether the Catholic narrative constituted such a ‘dangerous’ memory for the wider Japanese community in the context of war-time mil- itaristic and aggressive Japa- nese Imperial ambitions, also reporting on the human cost of the fateful United States’ decision to deploy the atomic bombs. Both papal visits to Nagasa- ki (Pope John Paul II in 1981 and Pope Francis in 2019) occurred on days of inclem- ent weather. Pope John Paul II visited in February. When he arrived for an outdoor mass there was a rare snowstorm. Pictures of the rally show numbed but stoic believers on a white snowy field, patriotically waving Jap- anese flags. Two of the survivors I in- terviewed, Ozaki Tomei and Mine Toru, had a personal connection to the now-can- onised Pope. The orphanage which took both of them in after the death of their moth- ers was founded by a Polish Franciscan priest-mission- ary, Maximilian Maria Kolbe (1894-1941), who gave up his own life on behalf of another, to eventually die inAuschwitz. Ozaki became a brother in the Seibo no Kishi Knights of the Holy Mother order in Nagasaki and later travelled to Poland to meet the man whose life was saved by Kol- be’s actions. Despite the freezing cold, the Nagasaki Christians went to an outdoor mass in the early morning snow and John Paul II is remembered for his strong message and his ability to deliver it in Japanese (and four other languages). “War is the work of humanity,” he told them. “War is destruction of hu- man life; war is death.” His speech influenced a gradual transformation of the reli- gious community’s memo- ry and interpretation of the bombing. “After the Pope stated ‘that’ [war is the work of humanity], he said [we] must talk about it ... This was what changed,” Kataoka Chizuko, a religious who is a past Principal of Junshin Girls’ University ex- plained to me in an interview The evening before, I visited a hot springs overlooking the valley and couldn’t help but visualise where the 12 survivors were at 11.02am on 9 August 1945 ... as I surveyed the scene, the emotion welled deep within.” Dr Gwyn McClelland