Re-Interpreting Hansai: Burnt Offerings as the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb

When the second atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, the local Catholic community’s suburb of Urakami was decimated. The Urakami Catholics were shaped by centuries of persecution and marginalisation and assigned a particular meaning to “surviving the bomb.” This writing, part of a larger project on memories of the bomb in this community, explores the religious vocabulary of suffering that emerged in the wake of the bomb. In particular, this article explores Nagai Takashi’s early characterisation of the bomb in religious terms as hansai (burnt offering), and the challenges to that characterisation which emerged in the community and beyond the 1950s. Such challenges are voiced in this article by ordinary men and women, who express a wish to break through the silence on the impact of the bomb on Urakami, and add their experiences to the discourse dominated by men like Nagai. In the testimony of the survivors, there is a palpable tension in this study between the history of dominating “great men” and the testimony of the lesser-known women and men who may not have been able to express themselves as publicly until recently. Communal memory highlights how the bomb is remembered within longer memories of historic persecutions and martyrdoms. This communal memory allows Urakami Catholics a sense of agency, and the possibility of resistance against an identity of exclusive victimhood. Initially the hansai interpretation encouraged believers who were disconsolate about the suggestion that the bomb could have represented a punishment. Although the impact of Nagai’s early interpretation was great, it was challenged at the time and has continued to be challenged ever since. Some respondents were negative about the legacy of Nagai, and others re-interpreted in their own ways the meanings of hansai, and the related vocabulary setsuri (divine providence) and shiren (test of faith). By reference to oral history, this chapter suggests that much of the community has consciously moved beyond the early understanding. By engaging Rene Girard’s “scapegoat mechanism” and the theoretical framework of Johann Baptist Metz’s terminology of the “dangerous memory” of Christ, a new lens is developed for the understanding of this communal memory.