The empty bell tower of Nagasaki’s cathedral has finally got a replacement bell for the one that was destroyed 80 years ago by the atomic blast that levelled most of the city at the end of World War II.
It follows an international effort to fund the construction and installation of the bell at Urakami Cathedral, with $125,000 raised in just over a year from more than 600 individual donors, reports the Catholic News Agency (CNA).
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the two Japanese cities that were largely destroyed by the US atomic bombings at the close of World War II. Nagasaki was bombed on 9 August 1945, marking the second and last time an atomic bomb was used as an act of war. The atomic explosion at Nagasaki killed between 35,000 to 40,000 instantly, while many thousands more continued to die for months afterward from the effects of burns, radiation sickness and other injuries compounded by illness and malnutrition.
Following the Nagasaki bombing, parishioners managed to dig up one of the original bells at the site of the destroyed cathedral, with that bell being installed in the right-hand bell tower of the new cathedral after it was rebuilt in 1959.
The other bell, however, was destroyed and the second bell tower of the rebuilt cathedral remained empty for decades.
The funding initiative for the replacement bell was launched by James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in the US, who came to Nagasaki frequently while writing and researching a book about the local Catholic population’s response to the bombing.
He told CNA that a parishioner at the cathedral, Kojiro Moriuchi, had remarked to him that it would be “wonderful if American Catholics gave us the bell for the left tower”, resulting in the professor helping to spearhead the effort to make it happen.
Nolan explains that his involvement in the project has a personal aspect: his grandfather served as the chief medical officer at the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was developed, and later came with a survey team to Nagasaki and Hiroshima following the use of the atomic bombs.
Nagasaki Archbishop Peter Michiaki Nakamura blessed the new bell on 17 July and named it the “St. Kateri Bell of Hope”.
In remarks that Nolan delivered at the blessing ceremony, he said that US Catholics “expressed sorrow, regret, sadness and a wish for forgiveness and reconciliation" upon learning of the destruction wrought at Nagasaki.
One person, he said, wrote to him to say: “May the ringing of these bells continue to remind the people of Nagasaki of our sorrow for what their people have endured and reassure them of ours and God’s love for them.”
Another person told him that the gift of the new bell would help "heal the wounds" of the war and bolster "progress to world peace".
The bell will officially be installed on 9 August, eight decades to the day after the cathedral and surrounding parish were levelled by the atomic bomb. Nolan explains that the bell will be rung at 11:02 a.m. – the exact moment in 1945 when the bomb detonated about 1,600 feet from the cathedral.
At Nagasaki Peace Park, which marks the centre of the bomb's explosion, there is a section of wall from the destroyed cathedral.
For the rebuilt cathedral, Nolan says that he hopes its new bell “will bear the fruit of fostering hope and peace and solidarity between American and Japanese Catholics”.
Photo: People view Urakami Cathedral which was rebuilt after being completely destroyed by the atomic bomb, Nagasaki, Japan, 7 August 2020. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images.)
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