Christians in Nagasaki
On the 70th Anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, I learned something about the presence of Christians there. The article obviously has a strong slant (I’m certainly no master of the ethical dilemmas posed by war). But it’s well within tradition of Christianity & the “Christian Nation” question. A taste:
In 1945, the US was regarded as the most Christian nation in the world (that is, if you can label as truly Christian a nation whose churches are proponents of eye-for-an-eye retaliation, are supportive of America’s military and economic exploitation of other nations or otherwise fail to sincerely teach or adhere to the ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount).
Ironically, prior to the bomb exploding nearly directly over the Urakami Cathedral at 11:02 AM, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan, and the massive cathedral was the largest Christian church in the Orient.
[…]
Most Nagasaki Christians did not survive the blast. 6,000 of them died instantly, including all who were at confession that morning. Of the 12,000 church members, 8,500 of them eventually died as a result of the bomb. Many of the others were seriously sickened with a highly lethal entirely new disease: radiation sickness.
Three orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school nearby disappeared into black smoke or became chunks of charcoal. Tens of thousands of other innocent, non-Christian non-combatants also died instantly, and many more were mortally or incurably wounded. Some of the victim’s progeny are still suffering from the trans-generational malignancies and immune deficiencies caused by the deadly plutonium and other radioactive isotopes produced by the bomb.
And here is one of the most important ironic points of this article: What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (i.e., to destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in mere seconds.
Oh yes, those horrible americans. Whine, whine whine.Report
Americans have never had a problem killing christians. Power, politics, etc. are way more important than religion.Report
Especially if they are brown non christians.Report
I’m not as cynical about America. But I do note that America had its origin (the Revolutionary War) in killing fellow Christians. That’s one of the dumbfounding things about the concept of America founded as a “Christian Nation.”Report
Does being a “Christian Nation” (whatever that is since we’re not a theocracy) mean that can’t seek liberty or defend ourselves? I’d also say those those Christians that were killed weren’t the same folks running the Japanese gov’t. Maybe if they were, there wouldn’t have been a war in the first place.Report
mean that can’t seek liberty or defend ourselves
No, you must, as Jesus instructed, turn the other cheek.Report
Christians killing fellow Christians? Unheard of!Report
So what is the lesson we want to extract, when we look at history?
If the lesson is “America has done awful things, shame on America” then actually Notme’s response is appropriate. (Not a sentence I imagined myself writing when I woke up this morning).
Because history isn’t ever about history., its about using the example of history to apply to the present.
If I were to extract a lesson from the mass city bombings of WWII, it would be that the murky territory of war always, always, causes us to lose our moral compass and do things we swear we will never do. And I use the present tense intentionally.
When the Fascists bombed Guernica, they killed a few hundred people and some cows, and the entire world was horrified by the savagery. Less than a decade later, we were slaughtering entire cities, men women and children by the hundreds of thousands, without a second thought.
At the beginning of every war, people tell themselves its about a noble purpose, a higher good, then by the end, it ends up as a savage bloodbath that would embarrass the jackals.
This isn’t to handwave away war itself as illegitimate, or to despair over our human nature. Its my attempt to try and make sense of things like Nagasaki, and to be suitably cautious about the voices I hear at this very moment shrieking about the need for national “toughness” and how we can and should manipulate events in the world to our liking.
I think of how St. Augustine said that it may be necessary to kill, but that we should at the very least do it with anguish and regret.
So in the end, the lesson I take away is that whenever we go to war, we end up being those people who are able to incinerate children and even if it is for a higher good, we still need to accept that this is who we become.Report
Thanks. My only quibble would be that there was some issue with the mass bombing tactics championed by Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command. As a result he didn’t receive the same level of recognition as some of the other major British commanders after the war.Report
@lwa
Your comments about “america doing bad things” and history to apply to the present are good points. My education in american history was a lot less nuanced growing up than the true reality, so I actually find counter points to the “rah rah WW2 was about freedom” and “we were attacked first by the Japs” very enlightening, or did, when I first learned about them.
Interesting enough, I was recently in Mt. Vernon and my friend made some comments after viewing the slave quarters. Something like “Isn’t america great”. Given her tone, it was snarky, and somewhat understandable. I countered with something along the lines of “no different that the last hundred thousand years of humanity’s behavior”.Report
If I recall correctly, one of the reasons that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked is that they had been largely untouched by the conventional bombing campaign, and so were one of the biggest targets left. And the reason for being mostly untouched was because they were both pre-Commodore Perry centers of foreign trade and thus had a lot more foreign cultural influences (especially religious) and foreign citizens than any other part of Japan.Report
Not from what Ive read. The planners wanted a military target that hadn’t been suffered a lot bomb damage so they could understand the bomb effects. Nagasaki wasn’t a main target. The main target for that mission was Kokura which was spared b/c of smoke created by the firebombing of the near by town of Yahata the day before.Report
The selection will have been overdetermined. The irony about Christians killing anyone or Christians at war hasn’t been fresh since Constantine saw his vision. “In hoc signo vinces.” Chi-Rho. You can look it up! It’s been in all the newspapers since 312 CE.Report
Tangential association: did you ever read Evelyn Waugh’s Helena? It’s a fictional biography of Constantines’s mother, and I think it might be right up your alley.Report
Thanks – looks terrific.Report
I recently read this about one of the last living people to work on the bomb. He said this:
Whereas, the author of the piece:
My daughter wrote a report in high-school about this. She interviewed the teacher of her Japanese class (she was taking it through community college). The teacher, who was a little girl in Japan at the time, said, “We would never have surrendered otherwise.”
War is terrible. It is always regrettable. It leads to things like this, that, in context, are completely logical and defensible. I contend it is no more or less moral than any of the rest of warfare, which humans have conducted since before there were cities.Report
It’s my belief that once the science was in place weaponization was inevitable. If not by us than by some other country. And once the weapon had been built it was inevitable that it would be used against a civilian target in a conflict. If not by us against Japan, then somewhere and somewhen else. This was inevitable and, perhaps, even necessary in some sense. As impressive as glassifying a desert may be, I don’t believe the true existential horror of what had been created could properly be appreciated until an actual city full of living, breathing humans had been actually incinerated.
Now I don’t have a strong opinion either way on whether the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary, moral, or justified, but I do wonder if maybe, taking the long view of things, whether ultimately it was better for humanity’s sake that the inevitable happened early on and with those relatively small devices. The first use case could very easily have involved much larger weapons being used against much larger cities and with exponentially greater loss of life.
Can’t ever know of course, but it’s worth considering.Report
As impressive as glassifying a desert may be, I don’t believe the true existential horror of what had been created could properly be appreciated until an actual city full of living, breathing humans had been actually incinerated.
The same thing happened as a result of the fire bombings so I don’t understand how the atomic bomb was “worse.” It just happedned to be a new and novel weapon. And the japanese have been playing the victim for the last 70 years.Report