Valuing St Mary’s Cathedral (Urakami Cathedral) in Nagasaki
Recently I lectured at the University of Tokyo on my recent article published by the Journal of Cultural Economy. It proved to be an excellent opportunity for me to take stock of my work on this since late in 2018, thanks to a workshop at the University of Copenhagen and to the editors: Jane Caple and Sarah Roddy. The new article was published in the Journal of Cultural Economy, “Valuing the Urakami Cathedral after the Atomic Bombing: Fundraising and Social Rupture in Nagasaki.”
Some questions I considered within this article included whether or how, experiences of communally shared disaster may lead to shared ownership of ruins such as that of the Urakami Cathedral? What about in a case such as this when the ruins are especially iconic/symbolic, and when they draw tourists?
By examining the concept of social rupture which supports some voices, while neglecting others, and scholar David Graeber’s discussion of value bringing ‘universes into being’, I discuss in the article the case of the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral – the loss of which some in Nagasaki still rue today as a potential “World Heritage” drawcard for the city and as memory of the devastation of the atomic bombing. While a Nagasaki council member (Iwaguchi Natsuo) called them a “Christian Cross of the 20th Century,” and lamented the loss of their heritage, the Catholic community razed the ruins in 1958, with the support of the City Mayor, and begun the task of rebuilding, supported partially by fundraising carried out in the United States. As readers may know, in 2018 UNESCO World Heritage was declared for twelve sites in the Nagasaki region.
In the aftermath of the bombing, while civilians and councilmen argued that the ‘shared’ atomic catastrophe led to a shared ownership of these ruins, the Catholic community tended to have a different understanding of their estimation of the value of the remains of the building.
In 1999 I walked into the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and saw a ruined (replica) cathedral. Ever since, I’ve been interested in this building and by extension the community that lived in the region who suffered enormous losses in the atomic bombing of the city by the United States. Silke Arnold-de Simine (2015) argues that burnt out skeletons of buildings ‘authenticate catastrophes and the trauma they induce.’[1] In this way, by the ruins as object, trauma became visible in Nagasaki.
The other supporting pillar for my argument was the work I’ve done in interviewing Catholic sufferers of the atomic bombing (hibakusha), between 2014 and 2018, (and published in 2019 in my monograph that uses a theological framework to consider Catholic narratives in history: It is called Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki).
I discuss in the new article how the narrative of the Cathedral prior to the bombing is incredibly important in order to understand the reasons for the community wanting to rebuild. That is because the community did not only suffer an atomic bombing, but also persecutions due to the Christian-ban of the Tokugawa (and early Meiji) government that had scarred generations before. When the original Cathedral was built, it was at great cost to this community. It was conceived only sixteen years after thousands of exiles who had been transported to prison camps around Japan were repatriated in Urakami. The building of this first structure was represented as a survival story, and two of my interviewees in my oral history of Catholic sufferers of the bombing showed me pictures of their family members in front of the original red brick cathedral. As well as bringing out the Catholic narratives that come out of memory of survival of previous persecution events, I discuss the civil concern for keeping the symbolic ruins, and also for tourism in the aftermath.
As well, I discuss the fundraising undertaken by the community for the rebuilding project, including the trip by the Bishop, Yamaguchi to the United States, where considerable funds were raised. As I write in the piece, the “American ‘Christian’ involvement in the funding of the new Urakami Cathedral adds a layer of complexity to the politics of value,” and was a point of contention in Nagasaki more recently.
I include just one photograph here out of quite a few in the article itself as it also represents the different way that the cathedral ruins were valued by the fact that it is a tourist postcard, representing the scene of a memorial service held on 23 November 1945.
In short, my article examines the competing claims of value around the Cathedral ruins in post-atomic Nagasaki, by raising some lesser-known voices of atomic bombing sufferers (known as hibakusha), to situate the rebuilding and its funding within a Catholic narrative of liberation and freedom, after their previous recovery from multiple persecutions in history. I suggest that the concept of ‘social rupture’ incorporates psychological, sociological, political, and economic aspects of structural violence that tend to support some groups and deprive others (Dovidio et al. 2012). Centrally, I argue that by the Cathedral’s bringing to the fore competing imagined social realities, it is a good example of David Graeber’s insistence that value ‘brings universes into being’ (Graeber 2013). Thus, the new Cathedral was built as it was in the end valued over the ruins and their representative power.
At least two of the hibakusha (atomic bomb sufferers) I interviewed in Nagasaki almost 75 years after the atomic bombing, employed a reconciliatory tone by suggesting that the ruins could have in fact been preserved, at the same time as building a new cathedral for the community of Catholic Urakami. Additionally, despite the social aspects of rupture I examined for this historical study, by the early twenty-first century social change has led to opportunities for further reconciliation within the community of wider Nagasaki.
We should remember that rather than a church building it is frequently the non-human environment where people feel drawn to the divine. As value ‘brings universes into being’, other locations in the wider region are also valued highly for demonstrating memory, symbolism, and resonance. It is notable that in the nomination of the new World Heritage sites in 2018 for ‘Hidden Christian heritage’ only two out of twelve sites constituted church buildings. For UNESCO and for the local populace, rather than the exotic church buildings in the wider Nagasaki region, the broader human and non-human environment has been acknowledged. In my new project, therefore, I intend to turn my attention to a number of the new World Heritage sites, by focusing my attention on the expansive Goto Archipelago, a large group of islands around one hundred kilometers off the Nagasaki coast.
References
[1]S. A. Simine, “The Ruin as Memorial – The Memorial as Ruin,” Performance Research 20 (3) (2015): 94–102.
© Gwyn McClelland, 2022.
This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Cover Image: Postcard supplied by the author.
