Seventy-three years ago, on August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon “Little Boy” was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, followed on August 9, 1945 by the detonation of the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb over Nagasaki.
Urakami was a suburb of Nagasaki, on Kyushu the southern-most island of Japan. It became famous when the Nagasaki Atom bomb burst above it. Urakami had always held a special place in the heart of Japanese Catholics and was the home of the Oura, a Roman Catholic Church erected in 1864 to commemorate the crucifixion of Portuguese and Japanese martyrs in 1597. It was here that Fr. Maximilian Kolbe established a monastery in May 1931. During the long years when Christianity was outlawed in Japan, it was the farming community of Urakami that kept the flame of Catholicism alive. When the Atom bomb burst over Nagasaki at 11 a.m. on August 9, 1945, about 73,000 people were killed as a result of the blast at Nagasaki.
At the time of the bombing, there were approximately 20,000 Catholics living in Nagasaki, 15,000 to 16,000 of whom lived in the Urakami district. It has been estimated that as many as 10,000 Catholics were killed by the atomic bomb.
As of 2023, there were 131 priests serving 57,692 Catholics in 72 parishes in the archdiocese of Nagasaki.
Urakami Cathedral after the atomic bomb blast.
Urakami Cathedral Today