Paul Yamaguchi Aijirō, bishop of the bomb years

Paul Yamaguchi Aijirō was born on 14 July 1894 in Urakami, in the village of Yamazato, into one of the old Christian families of the valley.¹²³His father, Yamaguchi Aikichi, had been one of the Urakami Christians sent into exile in the great persecution of 1867 to 1873, the Yonban Kuzure. He was taken to Kanazawa with some five hundred others, and came home only after the ban on Christianity was lifted.³⁸The boy who grew up among those returned exiles would one day be their bishop, and would rebuild their church.

He studied at the seminary in Nagasaki and in 1919 was sent to Rome, to the Urban College of Propaganda Fide, where students came from every nation.¹³Years later, in a radio interview, he remembered it with delight: "an assembly of students from every country," with no sense of being a foreigner, "because that is the Catholic spirit: people of every race mixed together, with no barrier of race or nationality, and in our common life it really was so, not as a theory but in fact."³Among his classmates was Norman Gilroy, the future cardinal archbishop of Sydney.³Yamaguchi was ordained priest in Rome on 24 December 1923.¹³

Back in Japan he served as parish priest at Tainoura in the Gotō islands, taught at the Nagasaki seminary from 1926, and from about 1930 was parish priest of Nakamachi church near Nagasaki station, the church Bishop Cousin had blessed in 1897.¹³⁷In 1936 he became prefect apostolic of Kagoshima, taking over a mission from which the Canadian Franciscans had been forced out.³When Bishop Hayasaka resigned the next year, Yamaguchi was named bishop of Nagasaki on 1 July 1937 and consecrated on 7 November by the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Paolo Marella; he was the first bishop to come from the diocese of Nagasaki itself.¹³⁴

He became bishop just as the war with China widened. The scholar Hirokazu Miyazaki, who has studied his papers, records that Yamaguchi's pastoral letters of 1938 and 1939 spoke, as the Church's leaders were then expected to, of loyalty to the emperor and of the war as a "holy war"; Miyazaki adds that these words were written with the authorities' eyes upon them, and that what Yamaguchi privately thought cannot be read from the church papers.³It is part of the honest record of a hard time for the whole Church in Japan.

In August 1943 the apostolic delegate summoned him to Tokyo and asked him to go to the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies as a "religious pacification" chaplain; Yamaguchi agreed after the Navy assured him the work would be purely religious.³He was sent with the Jesuit Ogihara Akira and two other Japanese priests to Flores, an island about half Catholic, whose Dutch missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word were about to be interned.³

On the very night he arrived, Miyazaki writes, Yamaguchi went alone to the quarters of the new naval commander, Captain Satō, and asked him not to intern the missionaries. Satō agreed to wait until the bishop had toured the island; Yamaguchi then submitted a detailed report arguing that internment was unnecessary and would harm the island's government, and in the end the missionaries stayed.³When a Dutch priest, the head of the minor seminary, was arrested as a spy, Yamaguchi negotiated patiently until he was freed, and he did the same each time missionaries were detained.³Before each negotiation, the Dutch missionary Frans Cornelissen remembered, he prepared carefully, wrote down his thoughts, and prayed quietly before the Blessed Sacrament.³

He heard of the atomic bombs and the surrender in late August 1945. On 29 August he went to the missionaries' house and told them in Latin, "Bellum finitum est," the war is over; Cornelissen says that, though he knew what had happened to Nagasaki, he said nothing of his own worries, only, "while we are in Flores, let us work for Flores," and shared their joy.³Bishop Leven of the Lesser Sunda Islands called the Japanese priests "angels sent from heaven," his secretary wrote in his diary that Yamaguchi had been "an angel sent by God," and Cornelissen wrote that in Yamaguchi he had "met a saint."³

After the war Yamaguchi was held by the Allies in Celebes. Australian army chaplains found him, and his old classmate Cardinal Gilroy, moved by his account of Flores, asked the apostolic delegate in Australia to press for his early return to his bombed diocese.³Gilroy wrote that his friend had had a friendly nature at college and, judging from his letter, had "not changed at all."³Yamaguchi left Balikpapan on 26 December 1945 and reached Nagasaki in January 1946.¹³

He came home to ruins. The bomb of 9 August 1945 had destroyed Urakami Cathedral, about half a kilometre from the hypocentre, and his own mother had died inside it; his brother's family was also killed.¹³The diocese's chronicle records the hour simply: "11:02, the atomic bomb is dropped; Urakami church collapses."⁵

Yamaguchi set about rebuilding through the friendships of his Roman years. In November 1946 Cardinal Gilroy himself came to Nagasaki and blessed the temporary church built in the ruins on 1 December, and three Australian priests served in the diocese for five years.³In 1949 Gilroy returned as papal legate for the four hundredth anniversary of St Francis Xavier's arrival, and Yamaguchi presided with him over a solemn Mass at an altar set against the surviving wall of the old cathedral.¹³⁵He sent Nagai Takashi's illustrated booklet on Urakami Cathedral to Catholics in America, Australia and elsewhere to ask for help.³Nakamachi church, also burned out, was rebuilt within its old walls and dedicated by Yamaguchi on 17 October 1951.³He invited the Augustinians, whose friars had been martyred in Nagasaki in the seventeenth century, to return, and in 1952 three American Augustinians arrived.³

For Urakami the rebuilding of the cathedral was a vow. The site was the former headman's house where the Christians had once been forced to tread on sacred images, bought by the returned exiles and built on, as the parish history says, in reparation.³⁶The parishioners pledged monthly savings, and in 1955 Yamaguchi went to the United States and Canada himself, spending about six months raising funds and returning on 11 February 1955 by the parish account, or travelling through 1955 and 1956 by Miyazaki's (see Disputed).³⁶On 23 February 1958 he explained the plan to the parish: a "rebuilding" meant building as before, on the model of the prewar church.⁶

That meant clearing the ruined walls that still stood, and here Yamaguchi made the most debated decision of his life. The city's committee for preserving atomic bomb remains asked the diocese at least nine times to keep them, and on 18 February 1958 the city council passed a resolution for their preservation.³Yamaguchi decided they must come down so that the church could rise again on its own holy ground; part of a wall was moved to the hypocentre park.³⁶Some citizens still regret it, and the journalist Takase Tsuyoshi has suggested American pressure, without decisive evidence.³Miyazaki, after reading Yamaguchi's letters and sermons, sees instead a bishop who weighed history against eternity, prayed, and then took responsibility for his choice.³The new Urakami Cathedral was completed in October 1959 and consecrated on 1 November by the apostolic internuncio, before three thousand people.⁵⁶Yamaguchi told them they had done their best with the money they had, and asked them to go on beautifying it.⁶

On 14 May 1959 Nagasaki became an archdiocese, and Yamaguchi its first archbishop.¹⁴⁵On 1 January 1962 he made Urakami the cathedral of the archdiocese, in place of Ōura, because Urakami was the only church in the diocese to have been consecrated, its largest, and the place where the hidden Christians had kept the faith and returned to the Church.⁶That June he presided over the centenary of the canonisation of the Twenty-Six Martyrs, and from 1962 to 1965 he took part in the Second Vatican Council.¹⁴⁵He also served as chairman of the Nagasaki public safety commission.¹

Those who worked with him remembered above all a man of prayer. Fr Nakajima Masatoshi, who often drove him to meetings, recalled that in the car the archbishop always prayed the Litany of Loreto in Latin, Nakajima answering each invocation from the driver's seat.³In his New Year message for 1959 Yamaguchi wrote that time is "a trifling thing" and yet "everything," because God gives it to us as the way to eternal life: "what matters is to live in the love that never passes away, the love of God."³

He retired on 19 December 1968 after thirty-one years as bishop and archbishop, and died on 24 or 25 September 1976, aged eighty-two.¹⁴The son of a Kanazawa exile had brought the Church of Urakami through war, the bomb and the long work of rebuilding, and left it a cathedral standing on the ground its people had bought back with their faith.