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It is often the case that global events are best understood when viewed through the prism of the individual lives caught up in them.
With the coming of the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, the life of Takashi Nagai, as told in Fr. Paul Glynn’s A Song for Nagasaki (Ignatius Press, 2009), does just that, with the events of August 9, 1945—their repercussions, consequences, and even their spiritual meaning—explored in a way that few would have imagined or even dared do.
Fr. Glynn is an exceptional writer. He takes the reader—the Western reader, that is—into a world hidden from many of us, namely Japanese society.
His book, or rather the subject of his book, is on one level unremarkable. A young man grows up in a traditional bourgeois Japanese home. He is educated and cultured. In due course, he becomes a doctor.
Then something quite remarkable commences. There is an inexplicable attraction to Christianity, and it grows.
Eventually, the young doctor lodges with a Catholic family in Nagasaki. This city is to be a place of transformation, and in more ways than Nagai could have ever imagined.
A Catholic family in Nagasaki was not such a novelty at the time. Catholicism had been brought there by Jesuits in the sixteenth century and had survived, albeit for many centuries underground, through years of suffering, persecutions, torture, martyrdom even—but survive it did.
By the 1930s, the city had a Catholic cathedral, with indigenous priests watching over a devout and active community of believers. It was into this world that Nagai entered.
The picture painted of this young man is far from flattering. He was typical of young men of his generation and background.
Thus it is all the more interesting to read of his encounter with a very different culture within his native land, a culture that could be summed up as both attracting and baffling him in equal measure.
At the center of this attraction was not simply an ‘ideal’, such as Shinto or Buddhism could have supplied; instead, he was propelled forward by observing the lives and goodness of those around him living what many Japanese considered a foreign religion. Continue reading
- K. V. Turley is a London-based freelance writer and filmmaker with a degree in theology from the Maryvale Institute.
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