ABSTRACT

Many years earlier in seventeenth-century Nagasaki, executions and persecutions aiming to expunge Christianity drove the believers underground. Religion and the processes of marginalisation that came with it created a historic divide in Nagasaki. The United States bombing magnified the ‘fissured’ nature of Nagasaki. The citizens experienced the main impact of the bombing in the Urakami suburban area, the home to the Catholic minority, rather than the centre of town as in Hiroshima’s case. The atomic bombing accentuated Nagasaki’s spatial differentiation. Urakami’s landscape was obliterated. The United States bombing magnified the ‘fissured’ nature of Nagasaki. The citizens experienced the main impact of the bombing in the Urakami suburban area, the home to the Catholic minority, rather than the centre of town as in Hiroshima’s case. Stark socio-economic realities in the post-war period are behind the ongoing depiction of ‘two faces’ of Nagasaki, consistent with the history of the Catholic populace and their links to a burakumin underclass.