MOBILISATION out of Hiroshima 60 years ago to work in a weapons manufacturing zone probably saved the life of Hayazoe Jo, then a 19 year-old student.
Sixty years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city on August 6, 1945, Fr Hayazoe, now 79 and a Hiroshima diocesan priest, recalled the horror and the events that led to his conversion to Catholicism and, eventually, his priesthood.
“The explosion took place at 8.15, just when the tram I usually rode was crossing the bridge right below the blast,” Fr Hayazoe said, referring to his daily journey to school in Hiroshima.
Had he not been sent to Otake, a weapons and munitions producing centre about 35 km down the coast, he added, “I would have been among the blackened corpses”.
An estimated 80,000 people out of a population of 250,000 were killed outright by the explosion.
By the end of 1945, an additional 60,000 people were reported to have died from radiation poisoning.
On August 9, 1945, another nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, claiming more than 70,000 lives.
From Otake, Fr Hayazoe saw the “mushroom cloud” that spread over Hiroshima the day before he was told to return to his school to help identify bodies.
“The smell of burning bodies, the smell of rotting bodies, I couldn’t stand it,” he recalled. “Tears poured from my eyes.”
The city had been flattened, reduced to smoldering ruins.
“There were screaming mothers all over the place,” he said.
The war ended less than a week after the Nagasaki blast, when the Japanese Government surrendered to the Allied Forces on August 15, 1945.
With the end of the war, according to Fr Hayazoe, “the struggle for a new life began”.
His younger brother, who had been a student at the naval academy, also returned to Hiroshima.
Describing the sense of hopelessness that afflicted them both, Fr Hayazoe said, “He, too, felt that everything was ruined, totally ruined”.
Then one day, his brother came home with “an uncannily quiet expression on his face”, the priest said.
“He told me that he was in Nagatsuka,” near Hiroshima, “and talked with a Spanish priest there for about 30 minutes.”
Fr Hayazoe said he thought, “If anyone can change my ultra-nationalist brother in only 30 minutes, I want to meet that man, too.”
The priest was Jesuit Father Pedro Arrupe, who later became superior general of the Jesuits. He had opened the Jesuit residence to victims of the bombing and, along with other priests, was attempting to provide medical care.
Fr Arrupe, who served in Japan from 1939-65, converted his novitiate into a hospital and, because of his earlier training as a medical student, was able to treat the injured. The shock of the bombing helped convince him of the need for a “pedagogy of love”.
“When I met him, I was surprised to see that there were such people in the world,” Fr Hayazoe said. But his surprise became a decision: “Okay, I’ll try to become like that”.
Fr Hayazoe was baptised in 1947. Fourteen years later, on March 21, 1961, he was ordained a priest at World Peace Memorial Cathedral, built to replace the damaged cathedral in Hiroshima and in remembrance of the nuclear attack.
Today, Fr Hayazoe works in Hiroshima diocese looking after young victims of domestic violence, after having served in various parishes and at a seminary in Tokyo.
Reflecting on the inhumanity people all too often have shown one another, he commented, “If there are intelligent beings on other planets, they will say about us, ‘They are strongly addicted to evil'”.
CNS
