Twin Cathedral Bells calls Unisont Saturday in Japan’s Nagasaki for the first time since the nuclear bombing of the city 80 years ago and recalls the moment the cruelty took place.
On August 9, 1945, 7 p.m. 11:02, three days after a nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the United States fell a nuclear bomb in Nagasaki.
About 74,000 people were killed in the southwestern Port City at the top of the 140,000 killed in Hiroshima.
Days later, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered and marked the end of World War II.
Historians have discussed whether the bomb attack ultimately saved lives by putting an end to the conflict and averting a soil invasion.
But these calculations meant a little to the survivors, many of whom fought decades of physical and psychological trauma, as well as the stigma that often came with being a Hibakusha.
On Saturday, the two bells in Nagasaki’s immaculate fertilization cathedral together for the first time since 1945.
The impressive red brick cathedral with its twin tower towers on top of a hill was rebuilt in 1959, after it was almost destroyed in the outrageous explosion only a few hundred meters away.
Only one of its two bells was derived from the rubble, leaving the northern tower silent.
With funds from US church guests, a new bell was constructed and restored to the tower, and it will bell on Saturday at the exact moment the bomb was dropped.
Cathedral’s Chief Priest, Kenichi Yamamura, believes that the bell’s restoration “shows the greatness of man”.
“It’s not about forgetting the wounds of the past, but recognizing them and taking steps to repair and rebuild, and by doing that work together for peace,” Yamamura told AFP.
He also sees the time as a message to the world, shaken by several conflicts and trapped in a hectic new weapon race.
“We should not respond to violence with violence, but rather demonstrate through our way of living, praying how meaningless it is to take someone else’s life,” he said.
Nearly 100 countries are ready to participate in this year’s memorials, including Russia, which has not been invited since its invasion of Ukraine 2022.
Israel, whose ambassador was not invited last year over the war in Gaza, is also expected to attend this weekend.
This year, “We wanted the participants to come and witness the reality of the disaster that a nuclear weapon can cause,” said a Nagasaki official last week.
An American university professor whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan project that developed the first nuclear weapons speared the Bell project.
During his research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him that he would like to hear the two bells in the cathedral ring together in his lifetime.
Inspired by the idea, James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, began on a year -long series of lectures on the nuclear bomb throughout the United States, primarily in churches.
He managed to collect $ 125,000 from US Catholics to finance the new bell.
When it was revealed in Nagasaki in the spring, “the reactions were magnificent. There were people literally in tears,” Nolan said.
Many American Catholics he met were also unaware of the painful story of Nagasaki’s Christians, who converted in the 16th century with the first European missionaries and was then pursued by Japanese Shoguns, kept their faith alive secret for over 250 years.
This story was told in the novel “Silence” by Shusaku Endo and adapted to a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016.
He explains that American Catholics also showed “Compassion and Sadness” after hearing about the endurance of Nagasaki’s Christians after the nuclear bomb, which killed 8,500 of the parish’s 12,000 faithful.
They were inspired by “the willingness to forgive and rebuild”.
