On 9 August 1945, at 11:02 in the morning, the American plane "Bock's Car" dropped an atomic bomb, powered by plutonium and nicknamed "Fat Man," which exploded half a kilometer above the Urakami district of Nagasaki. It was the second atomic bomb to be deployed in Japan, after an uranium bomb had devastated Hiroshima three days earlier. As John Whittier Treat notes, apart from being "a redundant act," the Nagasaki bomb was unique in that ground zero was the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in Japan and Nagasaki itself had the largest Catholic and Christian population in Japan.(1) In an instant, 73,000 people died, over 8000 of whom were Christian. Less than one percent of the Japanese population was Christian, yet they comprised over ten percent of the bomb's victims. A larger issue for the victims, as well as for subsequent generations of Japanese and Christians, was why the West would target the most Christian city in Japan, and why would God allow His people to be so afflicted?

The Japanese theatre has offered two Catholic-centered responses to the latter question: Tanaka Chikao's Maria no kubi (The Head of Mary) and Father Ernest Ferlita's adaptation of Nagai Takashi's The Bells of Nagasaki.(2) I will first consider the Catholic context of the bombing of Nagasaki, and the Church's response (or lack thereof). Then, the two Catholic plays will be considered in the religious and dramatic contexts. Tanaka's play theologizes the Nagasaki experience in essentially Western, Christian terms. Ferlita's adaptation, on the other hand, uses the structure and style of Noh (itself rooted in the cultures of Shinto and Buddhism) to create another Catholic response to Nagasaki. Both plays, each using an amalgam of Eastern and [page 104] Western religious elements, attempt to theologize the Nagasaki experience from the Catholic point of view.

In the mid-twentieth century, less than one percent of the Japanese population was Christian, and only a small portion of that number were Catholic.(3) In the early seventeenth century, the Tokugawa government outlawed Christianity, missionaries, and the practice of Western religion, beginning a period of persecution that would last until the mid-nineteenth century. As the early Catholic and Protestant missionaries had worked out of Nagasaki, one of the Southernmost port cities in Japan, the converts there eventually created a large Christian population which went underground with the banning of their religion. These adherents were called kakure kirishitan ("hidden Christians").

With the opening of Japanese society under the Meiji Restoration, beginning in 1873 with the legalization of Christianity, however, Nagasaki became an open center of that religion. Urakami Cathedral, the largest Roman Catholic church in Japan, was built in the city, and consecrated to the Virgin Mary. The bomb detonated directly above this cathedral.

Even though its cathedral was inadvertently ground zero for "Fat Man", the Catholic Church never spoke out against the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Catholic Church's silence was not without precedent. Its silence on the Jewish Holocaust of World War II was the subject of Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy. In 1963, it was one of the first post-war works to criticize the Catholic Church and the Pope for failing to openly criticize Hitler's genocide. Although the specific charges leveled against Pius XII by Hochhuth were proven incorrect, the basic charge that the Church's supreme Pontiff did nothing publicly to stop the Jewish Holocaust remains a controversial accusation, first brought to light in the theatre.(4)

No such play as The Deputy exists for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead of asking why the Vatican remained silent, the plays dealing with the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki tend to focus on the theology needed to explain the events – to [page 105] attempt to justify how an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God could allow such a thing to happen. In short, Catholic (indeed, all Christian) responses to the bombs must become theodicies – explaining the presence of this greatest of evils, which stands in opposition to the Church teachings on the goodness of God and His creation.

As for the Church's stance on nuclear weapons in general, Pope John XXIII addressed atomic weapons in his last encyclical Pacem et terris (Peace on Earth), issued on 11 April 1963; but he did not address Hiroshima or Nagasaki directly. Likewise, the Second Vatican Council, under Paul VI, issued a statement about nuclear weapons in Gaudium et spes in 1965:

More recently, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops promulgated their 1983 letter, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, which was an American Catholic response to the arms race under President Reagan. What none of these documents do, however, is explain, in theological terms, why God allowed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to be dropped. These two plays offer theodicies that explain the Nagasaki event – theatre as theology, as it were.

This analysis will focus on the two Nagasaki plays for several reasons. First, as noted above, Nagasaki was Japan's most Catholic city, with "the most active parish in the country."(6) Second, ground zero was a church, albeit not intentionally. (The bomb drifted in the wind from its original target in the business/industrial district). Treat reports a local saying in Nagasaki: "The bomb was not dropped on Nagasaki; it was dropped on Urakami."(7) These plays, if they are to be true theodices, must explain why God would allow His church to be the site of the explosion. (After all, that was where His priests, nuns, and active laity were at the moment of detonation.) Third, Nagasaki produces Catholic drama and literature while Hiroshima does [page 106] not, which makes Ernest Ferlita's Mask of Hiroshima all the more interesting for featuring a Catholic family in Hiroshima. Treat also argues that literary authors tend to ignore Nagasaki in comparison with its predecessor, noting that there is "a hierarchy" in the discussion of atomic bomb literature: "Hiroshima, and then, only sometimes, Nagasaki."(8)

In Writing Ground Zero, John Whittier Treat argues that the major theme of much of Nagasaki's literature is the desire "to be a sacrifice, one consecrated not only for his fellow human beings, but for his abiding faith in the greater, unknowable designs of God."(9) In other words, martyrdom for the Catholic faith was already a theme in the literature of Nagasaki even before the bomb. The atomic bombing of the Cathedral, therefore, was read in the light of a literary history of martyrdom.

For centuries in Japan, the authorities regularly hunted down and publicly tortured and/or executed Christians. With the Meiji Restoration, Christianity was not only legalized, but people also embraced the Christian as the fashionable, Western thing to be; the religion was perceived by the educated elite as a gateway to the West and to modernization. However, during World War II Christianity fell into disrepute again and Christians once more found themselves in the role of the martyr, dying for their faith.(10) This martyrdom for the faith is a major theme in both plays. However, the two dramas treat very differently both the purpose of martyrdom and the role the survivors of the bomb found that they must play.

In 1958, Tanaka Chikao, a Japanese Catholic playwright, wrote what is considered by many to be his finest work: Maria no kubi. The play is an example of shingeki, the modern Japanese theatre modeled after Western realism. David G. Goodman, however, argues that Tanaka's play is an early form of angura, the underground theatre of the 1960s that developed in opposition to the Westocentrism of shingeki.(11) Subtitled "A Nagasaki Fantasia," the play presents the story of a conspiracy of Catholics who plan to steal and rebuild the statue of the Virgin Mary that stood outside the cathedral. The conspirators, a motley group at best, have all of the pieces [page 107] of the statue, except the head, which is too heavy to move. Yet, as the cathedral is scheduled for demolition, it soon must be moved.

The conspirators are led by two women: Shika, a nurse and prostitute, and Shinobu (whose name means "endurance"), a housewife whose husband is bedridden. Both women are Catholic, both dedicated to Mary (both the person and the statue), and both live lives disconnected from their Catholicism. Shika is a prostitute; Shinobu yearns to kill a young thug named Jigoro who has made her aware of "a necessity outside myself!"(12) All of the characters lead fractured lives, made symbolic in the pieces of the statue of Mary. And yet these pieces can be reassembled. Indeed, in the second scene of the first act in Shika's closet is the nearly reassembled statue missing its head and arm. Man III enters with an arm and reattaches it, having said the password, "In Nomine" ("In the name of…", a phrase that begins many Catholic blessings and prayers).(13) Tanaka presents a visual response to the bomb: the role of survivors is to rebuild the faith, a metaphor literalized in the reconstruction of the statue.

Tanaka's play deals very little with the bomb's dead victims. Instead, we see the keloid scars from the bomb on Shika. Mary is referred to as "the keloid Madonna," and clearly Shika's scars are meant to link her with Mary. Through faith and action – belief in Mary and God and rebuilding the statue – the survivors of the bomb will preserve the faith and be offered the opportunity to "act meaningfully in response to the atomic bomb experience," as Goodman argues.(15)

Goodman's analysis of the play in his introduction to the English-language version in After Apocalpse is somewhat problematic. Goodman argues that the play is more Buddhist than it seems, and that the play posits the Nagasaki bomb as a theophany – a moment when God enters human history in order to make His presence felt or seen. While certainly the statue of Mary coming to life at the end of the play demonstrates the presence of a real and supernatural God, the focus of the play is not on God (or Mary) justifying the bomb by His (or her) presence. Rather, it is the actions of the characters, as noted above, that generate meaning in a world [page 108] where God himself is silent and inscrutable, even if His emissaries are obvious and open. As with much of the Nagasaki literature about the Christian experience, the message of the play seems to be one of perseverance – accepting one's suffering and continuing in the faith in hopes of reaching Heaven after death.