Valuing the Urakami Cathedral after the atomic bombing: fundraising and social rupture in Nagasaki

ABSTRACT

After the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the ruined Urakami Cathedral, situated prominently on a hilltop close to ground zero, became an iconic site. It represented the rupture experienced by a totally devastated community and landscape in an irradiated environment at the end of World War II. Yet, beginning in 1958, the ruins of the building were razed and the cathedral reconstructed – an act that has remained controversial in the Japanese public sphere, not least due to partial reliance on American funding. This article examines the competing claims of value surrounding these Cathedral ruins and their erasure among the Catholic community and the non-Catholic population of Nagasaki and the politics of patronage that this involved. It draws on interviews to access the voices of atomic bombing survivors in the Catholic community, marginalised in the Japanese public discourse. These give insight into an alternative communal understanding of the cathedral tied into a much older narrative of persecution, poverty, resistance, and renewal. I argue that different perspectives on the value of the Cathedral and its ruins reveal the social rupture foundational to and concomitant with competing value claims, and their interrelated political, economic, and religious dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Atomic bombing
• Nagasaki
• memory
• Cathedral
• value
• public good

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Iwaguchi’s comments reflect the significance attached to World Heritage status in Japan (and elsewhere in East Asia) since the 1990s; for a critical analysis of this, see Rots (2019).

2 In this article, I tend to distinguish between the Catholic and non-Catholic groups, since my main focus is on the Catholics and why it was important to them to rebuild the Cathedral rather than to preserve the ruins. It is not my intention to suggest that the non-Catholic protagonists, who included city officials and non-Catholic hibakusha, were a singular group. Diehl (2018), who mainly focuses on the early years of recovery, categorises three groups, namely the Catholics, memory-activists (often but not always hibakusha), and municipal officials. As Diehl shows, the memory-activists were not always in agreement with the city officials. But, as I further discuss in this article, they were keen to preserve the ruins in contrast to the Catholics who wanted to build their new Cathedral on the original site. The Catholics of course included a large proportion of hibakusha, those who had suffered the bombing. While these Catholic hibakusha were not included in Diehl’s memory-activist groups in the earlier period, more joined as time went on, especially after the 1980s; as I indicate toward the end of this article, some Catholic hibakusha would come to reflect on whether the ruins should have been preserved.

3 They actually returned in 1873.

4 These are the figures commonly cited in Urakami and used by the Mayor of Nagasaki at the International Court of Justice in 1995; see http://www.mayorsforpeace.org/english/statements/calling/951107_ICJ_Nagasaki_en.pdf (accessed 11 May 2022). However, as I discuss in my monograph (McClelland 2020), it is very difficult to ascertain how many people were killed in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and more so among specific groups such as the Catholics.

5 These dynamics resonate with discussions on the politics of authority and ownership involved in more recent heritagization efforts under the UNESCO model. In particular, see Aike Rots’ (2019) analysis of the heritagization of religious sites in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia since World Heritage status gained importance among both state and non-state actors from the 1990s. Rots conceptualises World Heritage as ‘the new public sacred’ (9–12). It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss recent efforts to acquire World Heritage status for Christian churches in Japan, including Urakami Cathedral: this deserves proper attention in future research. On the 2018 listing of four ‘Hidden Christian’ sites on the Gotō Islands in Nagasaki Prefecture as World Heritage, see McClelland (2022).

6 Non-Catholic residents also appreciated its aesthetic from earlier times.

7 Yamaguchi served as bishop from 1937 to 1958 and archbishop from 1958 to 1968. In 2019, a story of friendship between Yamaguchi and a US Marine, Walter Hooke, was uncovered. Yamaguchi reportedly gave Hooke a cross from the ruins of Urakami Cathedral, which was returned to the Urakami Cathedral on the occasion of the 74th anniversary of the atomic bombing.

8 Today there are around 7000 members of the Urakami church (Shijō 2015, 191).

9 The Urakami Cathedral website provides no clear figure of the amount collected from the congregation. Instead, it states that the congregation could not raise very much and they therefore decided to collect 300 yen per month (from each person?) to put towards the fund (Nagasaki Archdiocese 2018).

10 Diehl cites the Katorikkukyō hō circular of 1 March 1958.

11 Here, I draw inspiration from Sooväli-Sepping, Reinert, and Miles-Watson (2015, 3), who distinguish between two kinds of rupture in their discussion on ruptured landscapes: first, rupture as ‘abrupt, sudden or explosive change;’ and second, ‘less obvious forms’ that include ‘ruptures of time, movement or relationality.’