(LifeSiteNews) — August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Japan in 1945. St. Francis Xavier, founder of the Jesuits, introduced Christianity to Japan on that same day nearly 400 years earlier, in 1549.
There are other profound connections between Catholicism and the final days of the Japanese Empire.
Hiroshima was obliterated on August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration. The first reading of that day’s Mass, from the Book of Daniel, was aptly apocalyptic.
“Thrones were set up and the Ancient One took his throne,” the prophet wrote. “His clothing was bright as snow, and the hair on his head as white as wool; his throne was flames of fire, with wheels of burning fire. A surging stream of fire flowed out from where he sat; Thousands upon thousands were ministering to him, and myriads upon myriads attended him. The court was convened and the books were opened.”
Anyone in Hiroshima that summer morning surely believed the end of the world had arrived with the use by the United States of “Little Boy.” The world’s first nuclear weapon killed an estimated 78,000 people instantly and a total of 140,000 by the end of 1945.
Only five photos depicting the utter devastation in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing exist. The Japanese photographer who took the shots was so overwhelmed by the scale of human suffering that he could not bring himself to further record it.
August 8 is the feast day of St. Dominic, founder of the Dominicans and seminal promoter of the Rosary. Dominican missionaries began arriving in Japan soon after 1600, around the same time as the Augustinians. The Jesuit presence in Japan dating to the mid-1500s produced the largest missionary footprint, while Franciscans started working there in the 1590s.
Nagasaki, the historical center of Japanese Christianity, became the locus of the horrific persecution that, except for small pockets of faithful driven underground, snuffed out the religion throughout the country for two centuries. Twenty-six Christians were crucified on Nishizaka Hill overlooking the city in 1597, even before the Tokugawa shogunate ordered the expulsion of foreign missionaries and the destruction of churches in 1614.
There are more than 400 beatified and canonized Japanese martyrs, including many European missionaries. Tens of thousands of other Christians were killed in Japan. Many chose torture and death over renouncing their faith.
READ: Pope Leo calls for ‘lasting peace’ on 80th anniversary of Hiroshima bombing
On August 9, the U.S. dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. An estimated 27,000 people were killed instantly and a total of 70,000, around one third of the city’s population, would die by the end of the year.
That atomic bomb exploded over Urakami Cathedral, then the largest Catholic church in East Asia. Parishioners inside the church that morning were preparing for confession in anticipation of the Feast of the Assumption. Melted rosaries were later found in the rubble.
The Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo noted the tragic irony that Nagasaki, the site of Christianity’s initial flourishing in the 16th century and its brutal suppression in the 17th century, became the target of the last nuclear weapon used in warfare.
Silence, Endo’s 1966 masterpiece later adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese, was inspired by Endo’s moving encounter with a fumie during a visit to the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum in Nagasaki.
Fumie, or “stepping-on picture,” were typically flat bronze plaques set in wooden frames depicting the crucified Christ or the Virgin Mary. Suspected Catholics, and later all Japanese, were required to step on the plaques in an annual public ceremony to prove they were not believers.
The fumie Endo saw had been worn smooth by the feet of countless Japanese, some of them undoubtedly Christians. He never attributed the Nagasaki bombing to divine retribution for the state persecution of Christianity or individual acts of forced apostasy, though some commenters have interpreted his work that way.
Pope Leo XIV recently sent a letter to the bishop of Hiroshima to commemorate the anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The pope called for nuclear disarmament and an end to war. The letter included a quote from Dr. Takashi Nagai, “The person of love is the person of ‘bravery’ who does not bear arms.”
A radiologist and medical school professor, Nagai was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1933 and witnessed Japan’s bloodthirsty conduct in Manchuria. The experience led the one-time atheist to be baptized in 1934 in Urakami Cathedral, where he later married a devoutly Catholic woman descended from a family of “hidden Christians.” Both Nagai and his wife Midori, who died in the atomic blast clutching her rosary, were declared Servants of God in 2021.
Nagai became known as the “saint of Urakami” for his medical service to bomb victims and for his writings urging Christian charity and forgiveness. He wrote the bestselling The Bells of Nagasaki in the tiny hut where he remained bedridden from 1946 until his death in 1951 at age 43. Emperor Hirohito visited the hut in 1949 soon after publication of the book. It was made into a movie shortly before Nagai died of radiation poisoning that had been first diagnosed earlier in the war.
“Is there not a profound relationship between the annihilation of Nagasaki and the end of the war?” asked Nagai at a requiem Mass for the dead in November 1945, stressing the theme of redemptive suffering. “Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole-burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?”
August 14 was the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan priest with deep ties to Japan. He founded the Militia Immaculata religious movement to promote Marian devotion in 1917 and the “Garden of the Immaculata” monastery in Nagasaki in 1930. The monastery’s relatively undesirable but affordable location behind a mountain ridge would shield it from A-bomb damage.
Kolbe lived in Nagasaki from 1930 to 1936, when he returned to the “City of the Immaculate” monastery in Poland. He was killed at Auschwitz by lethal injection in 1941 on the eve of the Assumption, after surviving two weeks in a starvation bunker. In a heroic act of self-sacrifice and redemptive suffering, he had volunteered to take the place of a fellow prisoner selected by Nazi guards for execution.
Emperor Hirohito’s surrender address to the nation was broadcast by radio on August 15. In stilted Japanese barely intelligible to most listeners, he stated that the “war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.”
“Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. … Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors?”
August 15 is also the peak of Japan’s traditional Obon season. Families visit gravesites to make offerings of fruit and sake to their deceased ancestors, whose spirits are believed to return to visit their living relatives. For Japanese, there could have been no more suitable occasion for the surrender announcement.
For Catholics, the date represents a fitting conclusion to the period from the Transfiguration to the Assumption, a nine-day span suggesting a uniquely powerful novena that helped end WWII.
Robert Jenkins is a California-based writer who lived in Japan for 13 years.
