Ringing Out Hope in Nagasaki

The riddle of Japanese Catholicism has long fascinated me. At the end of World War II, Catholics were less than 1 percent of the population of Japan. Today, eighty years later, Catholics are less than 1 percent of the Japanese population, although Japan (with a below replacement level birth rate for decades) is in demographic free fall. Despite this seemingly unbreakable glass ceiling, however, Japanese Catholicism has been, and remains, more influential than the statistics suggest, in part because many in the Japanese elite send what few children they have to the country’s Catholic schools, including Tokyo’s Jesuit-founded Sophia University. (Alas, the university’s website does not suggest that Sophia is a New Evangelization dynamo. Its president’s message describes the university’s approach to education as rooted in “Christian humanism,” but the words “Jesus Christ” do not appear in the university’s statement of its philosophy, nor does the statement suggest that Sophia University’s mission includes offering its students the possibility of friendship with the incarnate Son of God.) 

I’ve often thought that an interesting comparative study would examine the trajectories of Catholic history in Japan and England. Both are island nations. Both experienced difficulties in forging a modern nation-state out of competing feudal domains run by warlords of one sort or another. In both cases, nation-building in the sixteenth century—in Tudor England and in Tokugawa Japan—was closely tied to anti-Catholicism. That is, in the process of forming “England” and “Japan,” to be truly “English” or “Japanese” came to mean “not Catholic.” And in both instances, conformity to that non-Catholicism was enforced through harsh state-sponsored persecutions. 

To be sure, there were considerable differences between the two experiences. Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I de-Catholicized historically Catholic lands, and, as Eamon Duffy demonstrated in The Stripping of the Altars, they had a hard time doing so. Things were quite different in sixteenth-century Japan, where the Tokugawa shogunate put a stop to what had, until then, been a rather successful if slow process of evangelizing previously unevangelized territories: a mission begun by no less than St. Francis Xavier. 

Evangelization in Japan was also enmeshed in a cultural collision between East and West, poignantly captured in Shūsaku Endō’s bestselling novel Silence. There and in several other works, Endō, whose Catholicism may have been a factor in denying him the Nobel Prize for Literature, explored the centuries-old tensions between being Japanese and being Catholic. No such East–West collision was involved when anti-Catholicism became a crucial element in English nation-formation. Nonetheless, Catholicism in certain sectors of upper-crust English society today is still considered a tad uncouth and not quite “us.”

My interest in Japanese Catholicism was reignited recently by the Nagasaki Bell Project, a noble effort being led by Prof. James Nolan of Williams College, the grandson of a doctor who was one of the first American military personnel to go to Japan right after the Japanese surrender in World War II. 

Nagasaki was a traditional center of Japanese Catholicism (and martyrdom) and had been for centuries when it was struck by the second atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. The city was not the prime target that day. But cloud cover over the city of Kokura shifted the targeting such that “Fat Man,” a plutonium-based implosion-type nuclear weapon, was dropped by the B-29 Bockscar and detonated near Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral. The cathedral—the largest Catholic church in East Asia at the time—was filled with worshippers going to confession to prepare for the Solemnity of the Assumption on August 15. Some 8,500 of Nagasaki’s 12,000 Catholics died that day or shortly thereafter.

Somehow, one of the two cathedral bells survived the blast, and when a new Urakami Cathedral was built in 1959, the surviving bell was installed in one of the church’s two new towers. Thanks to the Nagasaki Bell Project, a second bell, modeled after the original, will be installed before the eightieth anniversary of the bombing: a gift from America to Japan, and from Catholics to Catholics. The Latin inscription on the bell, cast in the Netherlands and prepared for installation by the McShane Bell Company near St. Louis, is a prayer of reconciliation and hope: “I sing to God with a constant ringing in the place where so many Japanese martyrs, with honor, 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.”  

There is not a lot going right in the world today. Those wishing to participate in something truly life-affirming and good can contribute here to the Nagasaki Bell Project.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.