ABSTRACT
The post-war legacy of Catholic doctor, Nagai Takashi, reverberates in Nagasaki and Urakami. Nagai survived the bombing in Nagasaki University Hospital and initially conceived an interpretation of the atomic bombing as providential suffering. Japanese Studies scholar Tomoe Otsuki writes that as a young doctor in the 1930s, Nagai showed his loyalty to Imperial Japan when he returned to Nagasaki and wore a military uniform at the hospital. Nagai’s subsequent conversion to Catholicism, after he returned to Nagasaki, was a development which informed his own perception of his second tour supporting the Japanese army to Manchuria. The power of Nagai’s interpretation was that he spoke to an utterly shattered society, in a ‘spiritual vacuum’ and an emptied-out landscape. Nationalist ways of remembering the war influenced Catholic concepts of martyrdom in mission school documents such as those published by Junshin Girls’ school.
