A Short Summary of Servant of God Takashi Paul Nagai's Life
This is a reproduction of an assignment for the Spiritual Formation course I took. I will post within the next month or so (a) reflection(s) on his spirituality
Takashi Nagai (1908-1951) was born in Japan roughly 30 years after the Edict of Toleration was issued legalizing Christianity. Takashi was raised with a Shinto spiritual heritage by his parents. His father was one of the first of his generation to be trained in the relatively new-to-Japan“Western” medicine. Takashi’s well-respected grandfather was a doctor who practiced traditional herbal medicine. Bringing healing to others was the family’s way of life and they, with diligence and charity, served the needy. As Takashi came of age he set out to master the newest medical techniques and continue his family legacy. He also, as a modern man, wanted to continue the development and discoveries during the dawning of the age of science.
During this time Takashi abandoned, more or less, the Shinto beliefs of his filialty and embraced the in-vogue scientific atheism that had similarly been imported into Japan around the time of his adolescence. But, despite Takashi’s great love for and ability toward science, he maintained within himself an inward longing that his newfound atheism couldn’t conquer. This interior movement was cultivated by his sincere appreciation and gratitude toward the intellectual heritage of Japan, especially her poetry, which constituted some of her greatest works and inheritance. Takashi thereby set out to stay up-to-date on the latest scientific developments while also appreciating and embracing the cultural heritage of his people. He was a synthesis of the scientist’s pursuit of truth and the poet’s. As he grew in one he also grew in the other. As such, Takashi was a true Japanese man. Rather than attending one of Japan’s more prestigious medical schools, which he easily could have given his excellent marks, Takashi felt drawn to the humbler university in Urakami, northern Nagasaki.
In 1928 he began his studies and his life there, only briefly interrupted twice by his service in the Japanese military. It was there he met his wife Midori, a Catholic woman with a notable pedigree of great Catholic lay leaders in the three hundred years of Japan’s hidden Christianity. Midori won Takashi’s heart through her love and became his bride and greatest aid in embracing Catholicism. Upon the death of his mother, he had an uncanny awareness that there was something more to life. This was a strong tether leading him forward. Around the same time he had studied Pascal’s Pensées. Particularly inspired by Pascal’s famous “Wager” and perhaps the small catechism Midori had given him, Takashi came to enter more and more into the Catholic faith. In 1934, Takashi was baptized. He and Midori had two children and Takashi became an irreplaceable member of the faculty at the university hospital where he taught and served as a radiologist. In his diligent radiology research, he became ill with leukemia. Nevertheless, he persisted in his work and duty toward his family and country. He was diagnosed in 1945
On August 9th, 1945, Takashi’s life of family and medicine was abruptly ushered into the atomic age with tragic and heroic first-hand experience. As he was preparing images for further examination at the university while the schoolgirls were chanting the psalms of the Japanese martyrs nearby and his wife away at home in the main part of town was praying a rosary the unthinkable happened. Just overhead of the Urakimi Cathedral the nuclear bomb, “Fat Man,” detonated killing roughly tens of thousands. From the best sources I can gather, 30,000 people died the first day with more than double dying from the effects within the next few months; this isn’t even to mention the illnesses that took years to develop and were passed on through genetic mutations introduced by the blast. The damage was unimaginable (Takashi’s first-hand account, The Bells of Nagasaki, is hauntingly beautiful and should be required reading). During the initial hours, nobody knew what had caused this hell on earth to suddenly unfold before them until they read the pamphlets dropped by US airplanes. It was the nuclear bomb. Dr. Nagai spent the next three days triaging and saving as many people as possible with the few surviving Urakami hospital staff. Consequently, it wasn’t until August 11th that Takashi discovered his wife’s charred remains with a melted rosary in hand. He was filled with the consolation of knowing she died in prayer, like so many others. He served for months rescuing and assisting the wounded from the explosion. Amidst this service, he had to reconcile himself to the fact that, not only would he die of leukemia without his wife by his side, but his two children would be orphaned without any of the life they had known in existence anymore, their friends, neighbors, or community. All had been made ash in the “utter destruction” promised by the Americans to swiftly end the war. Takashi, rather than crumbling into himself, experienced the most profound of Christian truths. In his poverty he was rich. In his suffering, there was utter joy. Takashi’s heart, though broken and grieved, was not heavy-laden.
He built a temporary hut of earth and wood on top of the rubble of the home he and Midori had made. Takashi dedicated the remainder of his strength and time to writing. First, he wrote of what had happened in his moving book called The Bells of Nagasaki (read it!). Some noteworthy works are Leaving My Beloved Children Behind, his last personal work Thoughts from Nyokodo, and his last spiritual work The Pass of the Virgin. To his surprise (and perhaps even to Japan’s), his works became national best sellers. Rather than padding the remainder of his life with luxury and decadence, an indulgence that could be easily taken as earned by a person accustomed to such catastrophic grief, Takashi donated the wealth he accumulated to the rebuilding efforts of Nagasaki’s reconstruction. In gratitude to the poetic beauty he had cultivated in his youthful appreciation of Japan’s cultural heritage, Takashi would have 1,000 cherry trees planted as an act of faith. It was a sort of first fruits of the beauty he hoped would encourage a renewal of life for the atomic survivors, known as the hibakusha. Upon witnessing his pro nobis lifestyle, Takashi became for Japan and the world a beacon of spiritual joy amidst the tragedies of the twentieth century. His witness was a sign of contradiction: the joy of a child in the heavy cloud of the atomic bomb.
In his writings and visitations with thousands of guests, he gave the gift of a childlike trust in the Providence of God, but not a childish conception of the world’s sufferings and trials. With his fame, he eagerly pled for peace while joyfully embracing the Father’s Providence. He hoped that the eucharistia of the faithful Japanese Catholics made a peace offering in the atomic blast would, in the Providence of God, be the offering needed to usher in the world peace he implored. His fatherly concern for his children’s wellbeing, soon to be orphaned, was both naturally diligent and yet supernaturally confident in the Father’s provision. In a sense, his paternal counsel, both spiritual and practical, was for all of Japan for whom he had become a sort of spiritual father.
During that time of slow death, writing, and accepting visitors his little hut was built into the small hermitage he would die within. There he was visited by the emperor himself, a papal ambassador, and, to his great joy, Helen Keller. It is important to note that most of his visitors were average people. Seekers, friends, and those inspired by his work and witness. He called it the Nyokodo, taken from the commandment of Jesus to love your neighbor as yourself. It remains a prominent pilgrimage site in Japan. I hope one day to visit it while the cherry blossoms are in bloom. It was there, as he became ever more conscious of his humanity and the Father’s love for him, that he radiated spiritual childhood and joy that became balm for the wounded world. In 1951 Takashi Nagai died. Years prior he had almost died, received last rites, he had even written his satori, or death poem, but was healed through the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Maximilian Kolbe (who was at that time, not a canonized saint, but a holy priest Takashi knew personally and felt he needed to call upon for prayers). This gave him more time to fulfill the Father’s plans for him on this earth (this was 1948). At his final moments, Takashi died without receiving last rites, bound to his bed, with his son Makoto. In his weakness, he was barely able to hold the rosary Pope Pius XII had given him through a papal emissary. Upon Takashi’s uttering, “Into your hands, I commend my spirit,” Makoto quickly took the family crucifix to his father’s side. With startling strength Takashi suddenly gripped the crucifix, exclaimed “Pray, please pray!” and died an “intense and dramatic, yet swift and peaceful” death in the manner of how God revealed Himself in Takashi’s intense and dramatic, yet swift and peaceful life (Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 247.).
