80 Years On: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Have we lost our distinctiveness as God’s people by seeking to fit into this world and the structures of this world? Does fitting in with the culture, or our national identity take preference over being part of the global family of God?

In the 1600s the Spanish missionary Francis Xavier took the Christian faith to Japan. The missionary activities of the church enjoyed a period of success and for a while there was a flourishing and growing Christian community in Japan.

This changed in 1597 when the emperor ordered the execution of 26 Japanese and European missionaries just outside the city of Nagasaki. For a while the Jesuits were able to continue their work, but in 1614 all Christian clergy were expelled from Japan and an attempt was made to eradicate all vestiges of the Christian faith. Christians were tortured and murdered if they refused to recant their faith in Christ. They were forced to step on images of Mary or Jesus, known as fumi-e, to demonstrate they were no longer Christian.

All residents of Nagasaki were required to step on the fumi-e as they were brought from house to house as a means to eradicate the Christian faith.

In 1873 Christianity was once again legal in Japan. The main centre of Christianity was in Nagasaki where some 20,000 Christians who had kept the faith alive through almost 275 years of persecution could still be found.

The Catholic church returned to Japan and a cathedral was built in Nagasaki for the people to worship.

72 years after Christianity had been legalised in Japan and a flourishing Christian community was once again gathering for worship in the cathedral, a B-29 bomber took off carrying a bomb called Fat Man.

The intended target for this bomb was the city of Kokura, but on the morning of August 9 1945, thick haze and smoke forced it to switch at the last minute to Nagasaki. Nagasaki’s sky was also hazy, but visibility briefly cleared.

The underground church which survived persecution and eventually built St Mary’s cathedral to worship Jesus and proclaim the gospel could never have imagined what was about to happen.

Using the cathedral to confirm their target the crew of the B-29 dropped the bomb.

Dr Gary Kohls describes what happened next, “At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonised in a scorching, radioactive fireball. The persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving centre of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero. And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in nine seconds. The entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out.”

Before taking off the crew was prayed for by chaplain George Zabelka. At the time, he thought little of it as the war was constantly referred to as a righteous enterprise, good vs evil, and we were the good guys.

Zabelka changed his mind when he visited hospitals in Nagasaki and saw people dying of radiation poisoning. When he learned about the Christian church of Nagasaki and the levelled cathedral it troubled him that he, as a Christian leader, had prayed for and blessed the aircrew that killed thousands of his brothers and sisters in Christ, not to mention all the other Japanese people who died. In an interview in 1980 he said, "I was brainwashed. They told me it was necessary.”

Jesus says, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”