Takashi Nagai

Takashi Nagai was born in 1908 in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, on the island of Honshu in western Japan. His family belonged to the local medical profession and followed traditional Japanese religious and ethical currents, including Shinto and Confucian practice. He studied medicine at Nagasaki Medical College, a city that had been a historic center of Japanese Catholicism since the sixteenth century. While a student he boarded with the Moriyama family, descendants of the kakure kirishitan (hidden Christians) who had preserved the faith through centuries of persecution. Reading Pascal and observing that household moved him from scientific materialism toward Christianity. He was baptized a Catholic in 1934, taking the name Paul, and married Midori Moriyama the same year. The couple had children, including a son, Makoto, and a daughter, Kayano.

After qualification he specialized in radiology, a field that in that era carried heavy personal exposure to radiation. He joined the faculty of Nagasaki Medical College and also served as a medical officer with Japanese forces in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. By 1945, before the atomic attack, he had already been diagnosed with chronic leukemia almost certainly caused by his radiological work, and was given only a few years to live. He continued to teach and treat patients in Nagasaki, whose Urakami district contained Japan’s largest Catholic community and Urakami Cathedral.

On 9 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Nagai was in the radiology building of the medical college, about seven hundred meters from the hypocenter. He was seriously injured, including a severed artery at the temple, but survived after emergency treatment. His house near the cathedral was destroyed and Midori was killed; a melted rosary was later found in the ashes. Surviving children had been evacuated to the countryside. In the days that followed, despite his wounds and preexisting leukemia, he helped organize medical relief among the ruins for the thousands of burned and irradiated victims.

After the immediate crisis he lived with his children in a small hut built from scavenged materials near the ruins of Urakami Cathedral. He named it Nyokodo, “As-Yourself Hall,” after the Gospel command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Increasingly confined to bed by leukemia, he wrote extensively. His book The Bells of Nagasaki (1949) combined an account of the bombing with a Christian meditation that presented the destruction of Nagasaki’s Catholics as a sacrificial offering for peace; it became a bestseller and was later filmed. Other essays followed, marked by acceptance of suffering united to the Passion of Christ. He received visitors from Japan and abroad, including Helen Keller, and civic honors.

Nagai died of leukemia on 1 May 1951 in Nagasaki at the age of forty-three. He was buried beside Midori in the Sakamoto International Cemetery. The Catholic Church has not beatified or canonized him, but he has long been venerated locally as a witness of faith, forgiveness, and peace, and is sometimes called the saint of Urakami. Nyokodo is preserved as a memorial, and his writings remain a notable Christian response to the atomic age.