Nagasaki's restored bell rings for first time in 80 years since atomic bomb
After heavy downpours Saturday morning, the rain stopped shortly before a moment of silence and ceremony in which Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki urged the world to "stop armed conflicts immediately." "Eighty years have passed, and who could have imagined that the world would become like this? A crisis that could threaten the survival of humanity, such as a nuclear war, is looming over each and every one of us living on this planet."
About 74,000 people were killed in the southwestern port city, on top of the 140,000 killed in Hiroshima. Days later, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II.
Historians have debated whether the bombings ultimately saved lives by bringing an end to the conflict and averting a ground invasion. But those calculations meant little to survivors, many of whom battled decades of physical and psychological trauma, as well as the stigma that often came with being a hibakusha.
On Saturday, the two bells of Nagasaki's Immaculate Conception Cathedral rang together for the first time since 1945. The imposing red-brick cathedral, with its twin bell towers atop a hill, was rebuilt in 1959 after it was almost completely destroyed in the monstrous explosion just a few hundred meters away.
Only one of its two bells was recovered from the rubble, leaving the northern tower silent. With funds from US churchgoers, a new bell was constructed and restored to the tower, and chimed Saturday at the exact moment the bomb was dropped.
Martyrdom, torture
Nearly 100 countries were set to participate in this year's commemorations, including Russia, which has not been invited since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Israel, whose ambassador was not invited last year over the war in Gaza, was in attendance. This year, "we wanted participants to come and witness directly the reality of the catastrophe that a nuclear weapon can cause", a Nagasaki official said last week.
An American university professor, whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, spearheaded the bell project. During his research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him he would like to hear the two bells of the cathedral ring together in his lifetime.
Inspired by the idea, James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, embarked on a year-long series of lectures about the atomic bomb across the United States, primarily in churches. He managed to raise $125,000 from American Catholics to fund the new bell.
Many American Catholics he met were also unaware of the painful history of Nagasaki's Christians, who, converted in the 16 th century by the first European missionaries and then persecuted by Japanese shoguns, kept their faith alive clandestinely for over 250 years. This story was told in the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, and adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016.
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France 24
2 days ago
- France 24
Dutch child survivor of Japan's WWII camps breaks silence
"Now I can talk about it without crying," said the Dutch woman who was four when she and her family were captured and held in "horrible" conditions in a camp on the Indonesian island of Java. Her three-year nightmare began early in 1942, a few months after the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. "There was a lot of bombing and the Japanese arrived. We had dug a big hole in the garden to shelter my parents, my brother and my two sisters, as well as the family of our servants," the 87-year-old psychologist recalled, speaking publicly for the first time about the ordeal. Indonesia was a Dutch colony at the time, and Imperial Japan was keen to get its hands on its oil fields and rubber plantations. The Japanese separated her father, Willem Frederik Einthoven, from the rest of the family, and they did not hear from him for a year. The son of Nobel Prize winner Willem Einthoven, the inventor of the electrocardiogram, he was an engineer who headed Radio Malabar, the communications link with the Netherlands, but he refused to collaborate with his captors. One in 10 perished His wife and children were sent to a camp in Tjibunut, near Bandung, where they were held with thousands of other Dutch, British and Australian civilians. The vast majority of the 130,000 Allied civilians held by the Japanese during the war were Dutch, with more than one in 10 dying in the camps. The fact that there were more than twice as many Dutch civilians as military prisoners of war has meant that their ordeal is more "vivid in Dutch collective memory", said historian Daniel Milne of the University of Kyoto. "We often had nothing more than a bit of rice to eat," said Einthoven. "Since I was the smallest, I would slip under the fence to find food outside the camp, but I could only get weeds," Einthoven added. Parents were punished if a child was caught. "We risked the death penalty." "We suffered from hunger, lack of water, the heat, a total lack of hygiene and hours spent under the sun being counted and recounted." One of Einthoven's friends named Marianne, to whom she had given a doll, died of diphtheria. "I wondered if that doll would also cross to the other side; it was my first questioning of death," she said. Convoys bombed Then, in January 1944, the family was reunited and deported to Japan, where the Japanese military wanted her father and his team to invent a radar system. During the journey, their convoy was bombed by the Americans, but their ship was spared. Many were not so lucky, with thousands of Dutch POWs perishing on the voyage, their ships sunk or torpedoed. The 60 or so camps that held "some 1,200 civilians in Japan" are little known, said Mayumi Komiya of the POW Research Network Japan. Some of the prisoners did not survive, including Tineke's father, who died of pneumonia at 51, weakened by the lack of food and the long march to the laboratory that had been set up for him. The family was then sent to a temple 300 kilometres (185 miles) west of Tokyo, where they survived in isolation. They heard about Emperor Hirohito announcing Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945 from "some Italians, who were also prisoners not far away. One of them threw himself into my mother's arms, and she was very embarrassed," Einthoven recalled. She still remembers licking soup off rocks with other children from cans that had shattered during a failed American parachute drop to them. Repatriated via Australia to the Netherlands, Tineke worked after the war as a psychologist in Geneva, Nice in France, and neighbouring Monaco, and had two children. But she never shared her experiences of those years with anyone beyond her family. "I am speaking out today to show that even if one has lived through something horrible, one doesn't have to suffer your entire life. You can move on if you choose to free yourself from the victim status," she said with a smile.
LeMonde
6 days ago
- LeMonde
Nagasaki's restored bell rings for first time in 80 years since atomic bomb
Twin cathedral bells rang in unison Saturday, August 9, in Japan's Nagasaki for the first time since the atomic bombing of the city 80 years ago, commemorating the moment the atrocity took place. On August 9, 1945, at 11:02 am, three days after a nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. After heavy downpours Saturday morning, the rain stopped shortly before a moment of silence and ceremony in which Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki urged the world to "stop armed conflicts immediately." "Eighty years have passed, and who could have imagined that the world would become like this? A crisis that could threaten the survival of humanity, such as a nuclear war, is looming over each and every one of us living on this planet." About 74,000 people were killed in the southwestern port city, on top of the 140,000 killed in Hiroshima. Days later, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II. Historians have debated whether the bombings ultimately saved lives by bringing an end to the conflict and averting a ground invasion. But those calculations meant little to survivors, many of whom battled decades of physical and psychological trauma, as well as the stigma that often came with being a hibakusha. On Saturday, the two bells of Nagasaki's Immaculate Conception Cathedral rang together for the first time since 1945. The imposing red-brick cathedral, with its twin bell towers atop a hill, was rebuilt in 1959 after it was almost completely destroyed in the monstrous explosion just a few hundred meters away. Only one of its two bells was recovered from the rubble, leaving the northern tower silent. With funds from US churchgoers, a new bell was constructed and restored to the tower, and chimed Saturday at the exact moment the bomb was dropped. Martyrdom, torture Nearly 100 countries were set to participate in this year's commemorations, including Russia, which has not been invited since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Israel, whose ambassador was not invited last year over the war in Gaza, was in attendance. This year, "we wanted participants to come and witness directly the reality of the catastrophe that a nuclear weapon can cause", a Nagasaki official said last week. An American university professor, whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, spearheaded the bell project. During his research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him he would like to hear the two bells of the cathedral ring together in his lifetime. Inspired by the idea, James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, embarked on a year-long series of lectures about the atomic bomb across the United States, primarily in churches. He managed to raise $125,000 from American Catholics to fund the new bell. Many American Catholics he met were also unaware of the painful history of Nagasaki's Christians, who, converted in the 16 th century by the first European missionaries and then persecuted by Japanese shoguns, kept their faith alive clandestinely for over 250 years. This story was told in the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, and adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016.
France 24
6 days ago
- France 24
Restored Nagasaki bell rings in 80 years since A-bomb
On August 9, 1945, at 11:02 am, three days after a nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. After heavy downpours Saturday morning, the rain stopped shortly before a moment of silence and ceremony in which Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki urged the world to "stop armed conflicts immediately". "Eighty years have passed, and who could have imagined that the world would become like this? "A crisis that could threaten the survival of humanity, such as a nuclear war, is looming over each and every one of us living on this planet." About 74,000 people were killed in the southwestern port city, on top of the 140,000 killed in Hiroshima. Days later, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II. Historians have debated whether the bombings ultimately saved lives by bringing an end to the conflict and averting a ground invasion. But those calculations meant little to survivors, many of whom battled decades of physical and psychological trauma, as well as the stigma that often came with being a hibakusha. Ninety-three-year-old survivor Hiroshi Nishioka, who was just three kilometres (1.8 miles) from the spot where the bomb exploded, told ceremony attendees of the horror he witnessed as a young teenager. "Even the lucky ones (who were not severely injured) gradually began to bleed from their gums and lose their hair, and one after another they died," he recalled. "Even though the war was over, the atomic bomb brought invisible terror." Nagasaki resident Atsuko Higuchi told AFP it "made her happy" that everyone would remember the city's victims. "Instead of thinking that these events belong to the past, we must remember that these are real events that took place," the 50-year-old said. On Saturday, the two bells of Nagasaki's Immaculate Conception Cathedral rang together for the first time since 1945. The imposing red-brick cathedral, with its twin bell towers atop a hill, was rebuilt in 1959 after it was almost completely destroyed in the monstrous explosion just a few hundred meters away. Only one of its two bells was recovered from the rubble, leaving the northern tower silent. With funds from US churchgoers, a new bell was constructed and restored to the tower, and chimed Saturday at the exact moment the bomb was dropped. - 'Working together for peace' - The cathedral's chief priest, Kenichi Yamamura, said the bell's restoration "shows the greatness of humanity". "It's not about forgetting the wounds of the past but recognising them and taking action to repair and rebuild, and in doing so, working together for peace," Yamamura told AFP. He also sees the chimes as a message to the world, shaken by multiple conflicts and caught in a frantic new arms race. "We should not respond to violence with violence, but rather demonstrate through our way of living, praying, how senseless it is to take another's life," he said. Nearly 100 countries were set to participate in this year's commemorations, including Russia, which has not been invited since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Israel, whose ambassador was not invited last year over the war in Gaza, was in attendance. - Martyrdom, torture - An American university professor, whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, spearheaded the bell project. During his research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him he would like to hear the two bells of the cathedral ring together in his lifetime. Inspired by the idea, James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, embarked on a year-long series of lectures about the atomic bomb across the United States, primarily in churches. He managed to raise $125,000 from American Catholics to fund the new bell. When it was unveiled in Nagasaki in the spring, "the reactions were magnificent. There were people literally in tears", said Nolan. Many American Catholics he met were also unaware of the painful history of Nagasaki's Christians, who, converted in the 16th century by the first European missionaries and then persecuted by Japanese shoguns, kept their faith alive clandestinely for over 250 years. This story was told in the novel "Silence" by Shusaku Endo, and adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016. He explains that American Catholics also showed "compassion and sadness" upon hearing about the perseverance of Nagasaki's Christians after the atomic bomb, which killed 8,500 of the parish's 12,000 faithful. They were inspired by the "willingness to forgive and rebuild".
