Priest's Story:surviving Hiroshima As A Child

[brandelynmarie]

[b]Warning[/b]: Below is a fairly graphic story of a priest who suffered from the bombing of Hiroshima & converted from Buddhism to Catholicism. [i]Hibakusha [/i](pronounced hi-bak'-sha)is the Japanese word for victims of the bombing and those who survived the experience.



[b][url="http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/WWII/feature0183.asp#top"]A Priest's Story [/url][/b]
Father Tadashi Hasegawa is a Catholic priest and pastor of Hiroshima's Misasa Catholic Church, which stands not far away from where he had been severely injured by the A-bomb in 1945. He sat with me in his rectory and, after serving iced coffee, told his story with animated gestures.

"I was with some 15 students on the river bank when the bomb dropped. I was 14 years old and a little over a mile from the hypocenter. At 7:30 that morning the air-raid warning had been lifted, and some of us students were taking a swim before reporting for our 8:30 work assignment at the nearby school. I was up on the bank. I heard a B-29 coming and those of us who were gathered there spotted it in the sky.…I fell face down on the ground. The bomb exploded and I was surrounded by yellow light. It was as though ping-pong balls of light were falling all around me. Tremendous heat burned fiercely into my back as well as into the back of my head, arms and legs. My clothing caught fire.

"The students who kept looking at the sky when the bomb exploded suffered burns all over the front of their bodies. They all died within two weeks of the bombing.
"Because my clothes were burning, I jumped into the river. When I hit the water, my whole body felt stabbed with sharp pain. When I got out of the river, my skin came off and hung down from my fingernails. I had to walk like a chimpanzee because of my hanging skin.

"All the houses in the area were flattened to the ground, and fires were beginning to spread. Burning debris sucked up into the blast was falling from the sky. Pieces of broken glass and tile were pelting down around me. To avoid the falling, flaming debris, I went into a small bomb shelter but had to leave when smoke began drifting in. As I started upstream, I saw thousands of dead bodies along the riverside and floating in the river. No doubt, they had fled from the burning houses. At times, I had to crawl over the bodies on my hands and knees. Eventually I arrived at a park. Around evening, I began vomiting blood and diarrhea started.

I was taken into someone's house. My father had located me and was searching in vain for a doctor. Finally, he went to a Jesuit monastery in the vicinity. It was filled with injured people, and there seemed to be no chance of finding help. But just as he was leaving, the Jesuit superior told him that he would come himself to visit me. The Jesuit was none other than Father Pedro Arrupe, a missionary in Hiroshima who would one day go to Rome as head of the whole Jesuit Order. Father Arrupe came to wash my wounds, which were encrusted and contaminated with ash and mud.

"I could not move. I was lying on wax paper placed over a mat. My condition was critical, and Father Arrupe tried to treat me for three or four days. That's all he could do. Infection set in, followed later by intestinal disease, and for weeks my life hung on a thread. By the time Father Arrupe came back on September 30, 1 was just skin and bones. He just looked at me and broke into tears.

"On that same day—after Father Arrope left—a German Jesuit showed up at my side quite mysteriously and providentially. My family and I were Buddhists at the time, but he used words like [i]God, heaven, Jesus[/i] [i]Christ, crucifixion. [/i]He asked my family to give him some water, and he baptized me. He then told my parents that I would sleep for one week and they should not touch me. My mother was very worried because my condition was horrible at the time. Thousands of maggots were in the wounds all over my body. Puss was oozing everywhere and I had a terrible bed rash.
"But I fell into a peaceful sleep for a whole week, My mother checked on me often, afraid she would find me dead. The priest checked on me about the third day and then came back after a week. He told my mom she could touch me. She began peeling the bandages off my arms and found that they came off easily, with no adhesion. She found dead maggots on the wounds, and the wounds were much better. They had healed on my back and all over.

"After my remarkable recovery my family became interested in the Catholic faith and were all baptized the following year. I went on to study for the priesthood and was ordained in 1965. I believe I was allowed to live and become a priest so that my prayers and Masses might help console the souls of those who died from the atomic bomb, In many cases, whole families were wiped out and no one was left to mourn for them. As a priest, I am able to remember them.

"Suffering is a difficult mystery. I feel strongly that the suffering of Jesus on the cross somehow includes the suffering of the hibakusha and all future suffering. Therefore, the suffering of these victims can have some meaning in that they are part of Jesus’ offering to the Father. Theirs was not a useless death. Although the sufferings of the hibakusha and those of Jesus were different phenomena and their magnitude is hard to compare, they are connected at a profound level.

"I am a hibakusha, I think the atomic bomb is an evil brought about by human beings. And I think it is necessary for us human beings to be honest before God and confess that we committed this evil. Also, we should be part of the anti-nuclear movement, but not so much out of fear, or a selfish concern that [i]my[/i] life be spared, as that everyone on the planet may enjoy life in the future.”


[url="http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/WWII/feature0183.asp#F5"]http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/WWII/feature0183.asp#F5[/url]

[Seven77]

Thank you so much for sharing this… almost skipped over it. What a testimony!

[dominicansoul]

Wow! I'm now reading "The Bells of Nagasaki" by the Catholic doctor, Takashi Nagai


I find these men's testimonies extremely powerful...to the point where I have reversed my opinion on the bomb...


I pray our world never witnesses such things again...

[vee]

[quoteI] I believe I was allowed to live and become a priest so that my prayers and Masses might help console the souls of those who died from the atomic bomb, In many cases, whole families were wiped out and no one was left to mourn for them. As a priest, I am able to remember them. [/quote]

[Nihil Obstat]

Those bombings were so awful.

[Laudate_Dominum]

Thanks for posting!

[catholicinsd]

The Eula Gay brought Religion.

[Vincent Vega]

[quote name='Righteous Anger' timestamp='1328413117' post='2381187']
The Eula Gay brought Religion.
[/quote]
Enola*.
And yes, it is amazing how good can be wrought from evil.

[catholicinsd]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' timestamp='1328413251' post='2381189']
Enola*.

[/quote]

You don't say.

[Vincent Vega]

[quote name='Righteous Anger' timestamp='1328413469' post='2381190']
You don't say.
[/quote]
[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enola_Gay"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enola_Gay[/url]

[Nihil Obstat]

The best part is how many Japanese were converted by the consuming fire of uranium and plutonium. Surely this was the most effective way to evangelize the infidels: burn the women and children, the buildings, the parks, everything and everybody they loved, everything they knew. Destroy their way of life, take everything from them. Make them die in horror and awful pain from fire and radiation. The love of God was truly expressed on that day.

[brandelynmarie]

Yes, God brought good (& continues to bring good) out of something that was so horribly wrought by human hands. I wonder who the German Jesuit was...he was a man of great faith & love.

[catholicinsd]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' timestamp='1328415753' post='2381226']
The best part is how many Japanese were converted by the consuming fire of uranium and plutonium. Surely this was the most effective way to evangelize the infidels: burn the women and children, the buildings, the parks, everything and everybody they loved, everything they knew. Destroy their way of life, take everything from them. Make them die in horror and awful pain from fire and radiation. The love of God was truly expressed on that day.
[/quote]

If only there was this technology before the Christians came to the New World.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='Righteous Anger' timestamp='1328416262' post='2381240']
If only there was this technology before the Christians came to the New World.
[/quote]
Absolutely. Think of all the native Americans we could have murdered. The entire North American continent would be Christian if only we had managed to lay waste to everything within it!

[4588686]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' timestamp='1328415753' post='2381226']
The best part is how many Japanese were converted by the consuming fire of uranium and plutonium. Surely this was the most effective way to evangelize the infidels: burn the women and children, the buildings, the parks, everything and everybody they loved, everything they knew. Destroy their way of life, take everything from them. Make them die in horror and awful pain from fire and radiation. The love of God was truly expressed on that day.
[/quote]

It is the way God order the Israelis deal with more than one tribe of infidels. Not with nuclear bombs, of course. More primitive means but the same effect.

[b]DEUTERONOMY [/b]
[b]20:16[/b][color=#000000][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][size=3] As for the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is going to give you as an inheritance, you must not allow a single living thing to survive. [/size][/font][/color][b]17[/b][color=#000000][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica][size=3] Instead you must utterly annihilate them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded you,[/size][/font][/color]