Valuing the Urakami Cathedral after the atomic bombing: fundraising and social rupture in Nagasaki

After the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the ruined Urakami Cathedral, situated prominently on a hilltop close to ground zero, became an iconic site. It represented the rupture experienced by a totally devastated community and landscape in an irradiated environment at the end of World War II. Yet, beginning in 1958, the ruins of the building were razed and the cathedral reconstructed – an act that has remained controversial in the Japanese public sphere, not least due to partial reliance on American funding. This article examines the competing claims of value surrounding these Cathedral ruins and their erasure among the Catholic community and the non-Catholic population of Nagasaki and the politics of patronage that this involved. It draws on interviews to access the voices of atomic bombing survivors in the Catholic community, marginalised in the Japanese public discourse. These give insight into an alternative communal understanding of the cathedral tied into a much older narrative of persecution, poverty, resistance, and renewal. I argue that different perspectives on the value of the Cathedral and its ruins reveal the social rupture foundational to and concomitant with competing value claims, and their interrelated political, economic, and religious dynamics.