The “Saint” of Urakami

Chad R. Diehl traces how Nagai Takashi became the representative voice after the bombing for his community and the city as a whole. Nagai’s approach to remembering the bombing supported his fellow Urakami Catholics, and his books on the significance of the bombing coincided with the interests of municipal officials and American occupation leaders alike. Early postwar Nagasaki, through the lens of Nagai, reveals a convergence of the interests of various groups of stakeholders, such as the Urakami Catholic community, the municipal government, and the Allied occupation, which led to both Nagai’s rise as the representative voice of the atomic experience of the city, as well as the endurance of the Christian image of ground zero. The story of Nagai elucidates the concrete ways in which the Catholic past of the city became so easily linked to its atomic present and determined discourse on Nagasaki for decades.