The Junshin Sisters of Nagasaki

In 1954, the Marian Year proclaimed for the centenary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Sister Magdalena Esumi Yasu wrote a short prayer for her sisters: 「マリア様 いやなことは 私が よろこんで」, roughly, "Mary, the things no one wants to do, let me do them gladly."¹By then she had already lived it. She had left a secure teaching post to found a Japanese congregation from nothing, had seen her school and more than two hundred of its girls destroyed in a single morning, and had decided, against her own grief, to begin again. The words are the thread through the story of her congregation.

The congregation began in the mind of Bishop Januarius Hayasaka Kyūnosuke, the first Japanese bishop, consecrated by Pope Pius XI in 1927 and sent to Nagasaki. The Prefect of Propaganda Fide, Cardinal van Rossum, had urged him to found a Japanese congregation of women for the Catholic education of girls and for social work, and Hayasaka took it as his own mission.⁷

The woman he chose came from far outside the old Christian world of Nagasaki. Esumi Yasu was born on 15 February 1899 in Hikawa, Shimane prefecture, in a family with no tie to Christianity.¹⁶She trained as a teacher, graduated from Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School in 1920, and in 1923 entered the mathematics department of Tōhoku Imperial University in Sendai, then the only university in Japan that admitted women.¹⁶¹⁴The sisters tell how she had once stood in a summer garden puzzling over the ordered spirals of seeds in a sunflower, and asked herself who had made such a world.¹In Sendai a friend lent her The Imitation of Christ, which, they write, overturned her whole view of life.¹At the Tsunogorō church she saw a stained-glass window of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, learned their story for the first time, and was deeply moved; on 8 June 1924 she was baptised Maria at the Tatamiya-chō church in Sendai by Fr Montagu.¹

After graduating she hoped to become a Trappistine, but her spiritual director advised a teaching congregation instead, and she taught mathematics at the First Kyoto Prefectural Girls' High School while she looked for her path.¹Then a letter came from Bishop Hayasaka explaining his plan for a Japanese women's congregation and asking her to join it. She took it, the sisters say, as God's call, the more so because the new community would be founded in Nagasaki, the city of the martyrs whose window had first drawn her to the faith.¹

To prepare, Hayasaka sent two young women to France. Esumi sailed from Kobe on 25 May 1930 and made her novitiate with the Society of the Sacred Heart at Marmoutier; she received the habit on 17 March 1931 and made her first vows on 24 September 1933.¹²Two weeks later, on 8 October 1933, Hayasaka collapsed with a cerebral haemorrhage.¹⁷In April 1934 Pope Pius XI received her in a private audience and blessed Japan, the diocese of Nagasaki and the new congregation, and on 1 June 1934 she landed in Nagasaki.¹

On 9 June 1934, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Hayasaka founded the Junshin Seibokai, the congregation of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, before the statue of Santa Maria at Ōura Cathedral, the same statue before which the hidden Christians of Urakami had revealed their faith in 1865.²⁴⁷Esumi became its first superior.¹⁶The name Junshin, "pure heart," was a dedication to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.²Propaganda Fide approved the congregation as an institute of the diocese of Nagasaki in 1938.²

The sisters name three treasures of their founders' spiritual legacy: faith in the Eucharist, devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the spirit of the Japanese martyrs, the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and bears much fruit.²

The first work was a school. On 8 December 1934, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the sisters applied to the prefecture to open Junshin Jogakuin, and in April 1935 the first entrance ceremony was held in a temporary building on the grounds of Nakamachi church, the church Bishop Cousin had blessed in 1897.⁴⁵⁹Twenty-eight girls enrolled.⁴⁵"We were poor and lacked everything," Esumi later said, "but we burned with love for teaching," and resolved to treasure every pupil.⁴In 1936 the school was recognised as Nagasaki Junshin Girls' High School, and in 1937 it moved to a new campus of five white buildings at Ieno-machi, in Urakami, today's Bunkyō-machi.⁴⁵The same year Hayasaka, never fully recovered, resigned and went home to Sendai, and from then on, the school's history says, Esumi carried Junshin on her own shoulders.²⁴In 1941 the congregation also took over a Catholic girls' school in Kagoshima, which became Kagoshima Junshin.¹

War came. From 1944 girls of thirteen to sixteen were mobilised to work in arms factories, organised like soldiers into a "Junshin student corps."⁴On the morning of 9 August 1945 Esumi, who had heard of the new bomb dropped on Hiroshima three days before and of rumours that Nagasaki was next, sent every sister who was not on duty at the factories to the congregation's small farm at Mitsuyama, about three kilometres from what would be the hypocentre. She stayed at the school, some 1.2 kilometres from it, with four sisters.⁴

At 11.02 the bomb exploded over Urakami. At Mitsuyama the sisters threw themselves to the ground; soon scraps of burnt paper drifted down onto the pine branches, pieces of a Bible and of the list of Junshin's mobilised students.⁴They ran back toward the burning city. Esumi had been trapped under a concrete wall and lay badly injured in an air-raid shelter, but she ordered them to go at once to find the girls from the factories.⁴Along the Urakami River the sisters lifted the dead one by one, looking for their pupils, cremated those they found in the schoolyard, and carried the wounded to aid stations.⁴Esumi and the injured sisters were moved to a hut at Mitsuyama and treated by Dr Nagai Takashi's medical team.⁴¹⁰Day after day news came of girls dying, some of wounds, others who had gone home unhurt and then lost their hair and bled from the gums.⁴In the end 214 members of the Junshin community, students of the corps with teachers and sisters, were killed.²³⁴⁵

Esumi decided she could never stand in front of a class again. "I have let 214 of my beloved pupils die," she said; she would spend the rest of her life praying for them, and she began to prepare to close the school.⁴Then the parents of the dead girls began to climb to the hut at Mitsuyama. "Losing our children is a great sorrow," they told her, "but that in such misery they died purely, singing hymns to Our Lady and praying, is our greatest comfort. That is what Junshin gave them. Do not close the school they loved so much."⁴Their words gave her back her courage: if the girls had wanted Junshin to go on, she would rebuild it, whatever it cost.⁴⁵

In October 1945 the school moved to a former naval workers' dormitory at Ōmura, and classes resumed in November with about 170 of the more than 700 girls enrolled before the bomb.⁴At the first graduation, in March 1946, about half of the 129 girls of the class had died, and their names were read aloud one by one.⁵Nagai, his head bandaged, spoke to the survivors about the humble kitchen pestle that wears itself away grinding every morning, and asked them to go into the world with that same hidden spirit of sacrifice.⁵In 1948 he wrote for Junshin the "Hansai no uta," the song of the burnt offering, which the students still sing every 9 August before the statue of Our Lady of Mercy over the school's grave of the dead: 「燔祭のほのほの中に うたいつつ 白ゆり乙女 燃えにけるかも」, "in the flames of the burnt offering, singing, the white-lily maidens burned away."⁴⁵The family accounts of the girls' last days were collected in 1961 in Junjo gakutotai junnan no kiroku.⁹In 1949 Junshin returned to its old campus in Urakami.⁴⁵

Esumi rebuilt far beyond what had been lost: a junior college in 1950, schools and kindergartens in Nagasaki and elsewhere, and in time new Junshin schools at Sendai in Kagoshima and in Tokyo.¹²⁵⁶Her last work was for the survivors. The parents of the girls who had died were growing old with no children left to care for them, and so on the hill of Megumi no Oka at Mitsuyama, where the sisters had sheltered in 1945, the congregation opened a home for the elderly in 1968 and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Home in 1970.²³Esumi planted the flowers around it with her own hands, so that they would live somewhere beautiful.¹She opened a nursing annex in 1980 as her final task, and died there of stomach cancer on 30 November 1980, aged eighty-one; her sisters bade her farewell singing the hymns to Mary she had loved.¹²

Three months later, on 26 February 1981, in falling snow, Pope John Paul II climbed Megumi no Oka. "I could not leave the city of Nagasaki without coming to Megumi no Oka, this hill of mercy and grace," he told the survivors. He greeted the sisters, "so dedicated to this work of Christian mercy," and recalled "with gratitude" the founder, "Sister Magdalena Esumi," who had led the house until the Lord called her a few months before.⁸Mary, the things no one wants to do, let me do them gladly: the Pope's visit set a seal on that prayer.

The congregation sent six sisters to Brazil in 1980, and in 1994 it was recognised as an institute of pontifical right.²Today Junshin students sing at the close of the city's peace ceremony every 9 August.⁵