An “Absolute Refusal to Hate”: Takashi Nagai and A Song for Nagasaki

On the morning of August 9, 1945, physician and radiology professor Takashi Nagai was preparing a lecture in his office in the Nagasaki Medical College Hospital.

Just a few days before, on hearing news of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Nagai had sent his children Matoko and Kayana to live with their grandmother four miles away. His wife Midori had remained with him and was at their home when, just after 11 a.m., Nagai saw a flash of blinding light.

“I thought: A bomb has fallen right at the university entrance!” he later wrote of that day:

“I intended to throw myself to the floor immediately, but before I could do it, window pane glass rushed in with a frightening noise. A giant seemed to grab me and hurled me ten feet. Fragments of glass flew about like leaves in a whirlwind…I had a glimpse of the outside–planks, beams, clothing were doing a weird dance in the air. All objects in my own room had joined in and I felt the end had come…I was conscious of my sins…and…asked for forgiveness.”

Eighty percent of the hospital’s patients and staff perished that day, bodies swollen and skin peeled off like overripened fruit.

The reinforced concrete hospital’s x-ray department was furthest away from the blast. Flying glass had slashed an artery in his temple, but Nagai, who was already suffering from leukemia, worked side by side with surviving nurses to treat the living.

As spirits began to fail, Nagai’s military experience came to mind. Realizing that the survivors needed a rallying symbol, Nagai used his own blood to paint the Japanese Rising Sun on a bedsheet, raising it as a symbol of hope in the time of horror.

He would discover the charred body of his kneeling wife only after hours trying to save patients and hospital staff. The gold of her rosary chain remained in her skeletal hands.

Tagashi Nagai’s life story unfolds slowly in the haunting biography, A Song for Nagasaki.

It is a powerful spiritual journey through a Shinto childhood to materialistic atheism as a medical student and finally conversion to Catholicism,

Father Paul Glynn, S.M. writes lyrically of the beauty of Japanese culture throughout this incredible story. Quoting the Japanese poets and philosophical concepts that have shaped the Japanese for centuries, A Song for Nagasaki is not merely the story of one man but a tribute to the people and land that shaped him.

Nagasaki had a unique place in Japanese history long before the atomic bomb. Shusako Endo brought the agony of its “hidden Christians” to life in his novel Silence, vividly rendered on the big screen in Martin Scorsese’s film of the same name.

Catholics in the humble farming community of Urakami secretly passed down their faith year after year when centuries of persecution and prohibition by the Japanese central government forced them to keep it alive without the support of priests who could offer the sacraments and provide instruction. The “secret Christians” were finally granted religious freedom in the 1860’s, and they built the beautiful Urakami Cathedral with their own hands.

When the young Nagai arrived in Nagasaki to study medicine at the university, he boarded with descendants of these Catholic Christians, and they shared their history with him. Skeptical of any religion, Nagai agreed to go with the family to attend Midnight Mass at the cathedral that year. The beauty of the Christmas liturgy moved him. He began to question the meaning of human existence after his mother’s death and was reading Blaise Pascal’s Pensées and a Catholic catechism when he was sent to war in Manchuria.

After the war Nagai returned to his studies in Nagasaki and sought instruction from a Catholic priest as well. He eventually married Midori Moriyama, the daughter of the family he’d lived with as a student. The tale of their romance and marriage is alone worth the price of this astounding book. They would have four children together, two of whom died in infancy. Makoto and Kayana survived the bombing and lived with their father until his death in 1951.

It is difficult to imagine a more humane response to the bomb than that of Takashi Nagai.

His city was destroyed, his community was shattered and his own wife, the mother of his children, was gone. Yet on November 23, 1945 Nagai gave a speech at a Mass held in front of the ruins of Urakami Cathedral. It gives voice to a tenacious faith as an offering for peace and a prayer of atonement “for the sins of all the nations during World War II.”

Nagai also participated in the effort to unearth the Urakami Cathedral bell from beneath its ruins. That bell rang out once more on Christmas Eve, 1945.

Though his head injury and worsening leukemia left him mostly bedridden, Nagai made the decision to stay in the Nagasaki suburb of Urakami. A hut was built for him and he lived there with a few family members, including his children, for the remainder of his life.

A lover of beauty, Nagai used funds sent him by a national newspaper to have 1,000 sakura (cherry trees) planted, transforming the rubble into “a hill of flowers.”

Nagai wrote prodigiously, rising to work before dawn and spending much time as well with visitors, many of whom came seeking counsel for their own struggle with bitterness. Nagai encouraged those left to cope with traumatic grief, horrific memories and torturous physical conditions to make the most of the time that remained to them.

 “Precisely because we Japanese had treated human life so simply and so carelessly,” he would write in The Bells of Nagasaki, a memoir he completed in 1949, “–precisely for this reason we were reduced to our present miserable plight. Respect for the life of every person–this must be the foundation stone on which we would build a new society.”

Nagai became internationally known as a voice for peace and forgiveness and was honored by thousands, including Emperor Hirohito and Helen Keller.

“Christian and non-Christian alike were deeply moved by Nagai’s faith in Christ that made him like Job of the Scriptures,” writes Shusako Endo: “In the midst of the nuclear wilderness he kept his heart in tranquility and peace, neither bearing resentment against any man nor cursing God.”

In a Credible Witnesses essay for Magnificat, Heather King states that Nagai’s “most remarkable achievement may have been the absolute refusal to hate, resent or retaliate.”

A Song for Nagasaki offers a unique reply to the question often put to Christians concerning whether the existence of God can be believed in the presence of evil and suffering. No answer suffices when we ask why we suffer, but an undeniable beauty emerges in the lives of those who, in the time of testing, ask only for strength and the wisdom to suffer well.

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You might also enjoy Francis Xavier Ngyuen Van Thuan’s “Solitary” School of Love and Resentment’s Destructive Power: Watching Oppenheimer while Reading René Girard.

Fr. Paul Glynn followed The Song of Nagasaki with another compelling biography, The Smile of a Ragpicker: The Life of Sakoto Kitahara. Kitahara, whose brother died as a soldier in World War II, converted to Catholicism after the war and was gradually drawn to serve the “ragpickers” in the slums of postwar Tokyo. Like Takashi Nagai, Satoko Kitahara remained thoroughly Japanese in her embrace of the Catholic faith, and readers learn much about the beauty of Japanese culture while following the story of her life.

Featured photo (Gunkanjima, an abandoned island in Nagasaki, Japan) by Jordy Meow on Unsplash. Takashi Nagai with family and Takashi Nagai among the Nagasaki ruins courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.