Joy Kogawa is known for her novels, poetry, essays, and activism. She was born in Vancouver in 1935, and as a second-generation Japanese Canadian or nisei, she has told the stories of Japanese-Canadians in her writing. Kogawa and her family were forced to relocate to Slocan, British Columbia and later to Coaldale, Alberta during the Second World War. She has also been involved in seeking redress from the Canadian government for the internment of 20,000 Japanese Canadians during World War II, and from 1983 to 1985, Kogawa worked with the National Association of Japanese Canadians. Kogawa is the author of Obasan, which focuses on Japanese Canadians and the injustices they experienced during and after the Second World War. On August 9, 2002, Kogawa spoke in Stockholm about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The following is an excerpt of her talk.

The First World War, dubbed the “war to end all wars,” gave way to another world war. And today we are faced with the numbing thought that the last “bomb to end all bombs” at Nagasaki may yet give way to the bomb to end all life. Arundhati Roy says that whether nuclear bombs are used or not, “They violate everything that is humane. They alter the meaning of life itself. Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate these men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race?”
I was in Nagasaki in June this year and thought of the pilot who flew overhead that day in 1945. In an interview, Captain Sweeney used the word “pretty” to describe Nagasaki. One novelist, calling it the “Naples of the Orient,” wrote, “Nagasaki overwhelms one with its beauty and serenity. It is a town of stone roads, mud walls, old temples, cemeteries, and giant trees.” Captain Sweeney said it was the greatest thrill of his life when he dropped the bomb.
There is a thrill in murder. There is a thrill in war. It is not just the certifiably insane who feel this. The lust for blood continues unabated in the human condition. But like parents of murdered children being faced after years with the release of murderers, we must face again the appetite for war, the fears that feed it, the hunger for vengeance. It is fresh blood the dogs of war demand.
At what point do we come to know that the blood we taste and drink is our own and of those we love? Hans Kung states that in our striving for peace, we should begin with religion. “Peace among the religions” he says, “is the prerequisite for peace among the nations.” In our religious mythologies we find sources of both violence and peace. The three deities of this talk are first, the God who demands all, second, the Goddess who grants mercy, and third, the deity who promises abundance.
The religion in which I grew up was Christianity. The God of my childhood was the God of Abraham, the God of the patriarchs, a God who demanded all. Like us, Abraham found himself in a world of death and suffering. In such a world, his God promised him abundance – as many descendants as there are stars in the sky. This was to be through Abraham’s two main sons – Ishmael, his eldest, born of the servant Hagar, and Isaac, the child of his wife, Sarah. Although Ishmael and Isaac lived as rivals, when Abraham died, they buried their father together, as brothers.
Today, three great faiths, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, claim Abraham as father. His descendants are indeed, as the stars of the sky; Jews and Arabs by right of birth, and Christians, by adoption and faith. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, traced his lineage through Ishmael. Jews claim their lineage through Isaac. All three are bound together as siblings.
The foundational myth of Abraham’s great test has confounded people through the ages. In the book of Genesis, we are told that Abraham was ordered to do the unthinkable.
Genesis 22. “The time came when God put Abraham to the test. ‘Abraham’, he called, and Abraham replied, ‘Here I am.’ God said, ‘Take your son Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a sacrifice on one of the hills which I will show you.’ So Abraham took the wood for the sacrifice and laid it on his son Isaac’s shoulder; he himself carried the fire and the knife, and the two of them went on together. Isaac said to Abraham, ‘Father’, and he answered, ‘What is it, my son?’ Isaac said, ‘Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the young beast for the sacrifice?’ Abraham answered, ‘God will provide himself with a young beast for a sacrifice, my son.” And the two of them went on together and came to the place of which God had spoken. There Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then he stretched out his hand and took the knife to kill his son; but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, ‘Abraham, Abraham.’ He answered, “Here I am.’ The angel of the Lord said, ‘Do not raise your hand against the boy; do not touch him. Now I know that you are a God-fearing man. You have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’ Abraham looked up and there he saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it as a sacrifice instead of his son.”
Until I read Carol Delaney’s book, The Trial of Abraham, I did not know that for most Muslims, it is Ishmael and not Isaac who was the intended sacrifice. But for all three faith communities, one of the main values that is gleaned from the story is that of obedience, of complete submission to the will of God. Carol Delaney asks us, “Why is the willingness to sacrifice the child, rather than the passionate protection of the child, at the foundation of faith?” She suggests that we need a new myth and says, “I ask that people imagine how our society would have evolved if protecti/on of the child had been the model of faith.”
Today, the children of Abraham in the West and the Middle East, Christians, Jews and Muslims, are speaking about justice, freedom and submission to God. Their words translate into violence and a growing dread that the fearful forces at play will propel us into a reckless abandonment of constraint and a catastrophic worldwide conflagration that will end life, as we know it. There are other voices in the world – voices that come from traditions of mercy and peace. To begin, there is a certain small island in the East, where the world’s longest living and intensely peaceable people live. My brother, a retired Episcopalian priest, was in Okinawa for a few years in the ‘90s. He told me that in 1815, Captain Basil Hall of the British navy steamed into Naha, Okinawa and was amazed at what he found. The story goes that on his way back to England, he dropped in to the island of St. Helena and had a chat with Napoleon.
“I have been to an island of peace,” the captain reported. “The island has no soldiers and no weapons.”
“No weapons? Oh, but there must be a few swords around,” Napoleon remarked.
“No. Even the swords have been embargoed by the king.”
Napoleon, we’re told, was astonished. “No soldiers, no weapons, no swords! It must be heaven.”
Okinawa must surely have been a culture as close to heaven as this planet has managed. We might well wonder about the spiritual heritage of such a people. Today they boast not just the longest living humans in the world – the number of centenarians per 100,000 is six times that of the US – but the world’s longest disability-free life expectancy.
According to The Okinawa Program by Dr. Bradley Willcox, Dr. Craig Willcox and Dr. Makoto Suzuki, Okinawan society “… reflects a cultural cosmology where the female embodies and transmits sacred forces (shiji). Most Okinawan villages still have “divine priestesses,” called noro or nuru, whose job it is to commune with the gods and ancestors and serve as spiritual advisers. In fact, until the late nineteenth century, the king’s well-being and success as ruler depended on the spiritual sustenance granted by the high priestess (kikoe ogimi), who was of equivalent social standing. This is a unique cultural phenomenon. Although women act as religious functionaries in other societies, there is no other modern society in the world where women hold title as the main providers of religious services.”
When Japan, that warring nation, took over the kingdom, there was an entirely bloodless coup. No soldiers were found to help later with the invasion of Korea. A disobedient people, Japan concluded. A kingdom without soldiers was clearly impossible. On Easter day in 1945, on the day of triumph for the Prince of Peace, Okinawa became a special target for the forces of hate. The battle of Okinawa was the biggest land battle of history to that point. In twelve weeks, over 234,000 people died, more than the number killed in August in the two atomic bombings.
My brother was in Okinawa in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the battle. Beginning at Easter, and for 12 weeks after, with the pastoral candle lit, a breathtaking action of speech took place. For two hours at noon and two hours at night, the dead were recalled and their names read. These were not prayers for the Okinawan victims alone – grandparents, schoolchildren, the familiar members of the community. The prayerful embrace included the naming of Japanese and American soldiers, those who had brought this holocaust upon the most gentle of peoples. Here was mercy quietly demonstrated. It did not make headline news. But the Prince of Peace, mocked and murdered on Easter day 1945, was powerfully alive on Easter 50 years later. In Okinawa’s Peace Park, the names are engraved on row upon row of granite slabs resembling the waves of the ocean nearby. A white towering structure encloses a huge statue of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy in Japan. She is described as an Asian symbol (with no deification) and is the central figure in the structure where each year on August 15 an interfaith service is held.
There is something surreal about the Christian calendar and the dates of war atrocities. Was it a deliberately conscious act to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on the Day of the Transfiguration, the day when Christ’s face became “glistering white?” The word for transfiguration in Japanese, hen-yo-bo, also means disfiguration, I’m told. In Okinawa, the day of resurrection was the day of death.
In Hiroshima, the day of transfiguration was the day of disfiguration. A Christian military chaplain prayed over the bomb before it set out on its journey. “Almighty God, Father of grace, we pray you, let your grace come down upon the men who will fly in this night. Guard and protect those of us who will venture forth into the darkness of your heaven. Lead them on your wings. Guard their bodies and their souls and bring them back to us. Give us all courage and strength for the hours that lie before us, and reward us according to the hardships they will bring. But above all, my Father, give your world peace. Let us go our way trusting in you and secure in the knowledge that you are near to us now and for all eternity. Amen.”
While this prayer was being said, prayers to the same God were rising to heaven in Nagasaki, from Urakami Cathedral, the pre-eminent presence of Christianity in all of east Asia. Nagasaki, visited by Francis Xavier in the 1500s, and later by renowned European physicians, was Japan’s window to the West. It became the primary medical center and the primary centre for European studies, to be visited by the top students of Japan. Although Christianity had begun to take root in the 16th century, within 100 years, the country was closed, Christianity was banned, and for the next 200 years, the Japanese Christians, known as the “hidden Christians,” were hunted down to be crucified, hung over sulphur pits, tortured and killed.
In 1873, the 235 year ban on Christianity was lifted, and survivors headed back joyfully to Nagasaki, settling in the Urakami district. Urakami cathedral was built there, brick by brick by believers, and completed in 1914, the year that began the war to end all wars. At 11:02, on August 9, 1945, it was precisely on this spot over Urakami cathedral, over Christians that the atomic bomb exploded.
Rev. George Zabelka was the Catholic chaplain on Tinian Island at the time, and as he put it, “the last possible official spokesman for the Church before the fire of hell was let loose…” He lived to regret his approval of the actions that day. “There is no state of corporate evil that is not the result of personal sinfulness,” he said in an interview in 1984. “In August of 1945, I as a Christian and as a priest, served not as an agent of reconciliation but as an instrument of retaliations, revenge and homicide… I chose nationalism over Catholicism, Caesar over Christ, as the “Great Artist” manned by Christians in my care, took off to evaporate the oldest and largest Christian community in Japan – Nagasaki... I played an important and necessary role in this sacrilege – and I played it meticulously. I mean it literally... A sacrilege is the desecration of what is considered holy. For the Christian, the ultimate place of the holy is the human person... Therefore every act of violence toward a human being is an act of desecration of the temple of God in this world. War for the Christian is always a sacrilege. There is no such absurdity as a Christian ethic of justified sacrilege. I am a priest who played a role in a sacrilege and that must be said by me and others like me without equivocation or else the future is a nightmare... I want to expose the lie of killing as a Christian social method, the lie of disposable people, the lie of Christian liturgy in the service of the homicidal gods of nationalism and militarism, the lie of nuclear security.”
For Father Zabelka, it was an act of mercy and grace that, in his old age, he was able to make a pilgrimage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to his Calvaries. He wished to look into the faces of the bomb victims and say, “Brother, forgive me for bringing you death instead of the fullness of life. Sister, forgive me for bringing you misery instead of mercy.”
Dr. Takashi Nagai was a bomb victim who did not live long enough to welcome Father Zabelka. He was a nuclear physicist, dean of the radiology department in the medical school of the University of Nagasaki, a medical doctor, scientist, researcher, artist and scholar, knowledgeable about atomic energy. He was also a Christian convert, one of Abraham’s children, and his beloved wife, Midori was a descendant of Christian martyrs.
He had his own understanding of the holocaust. It was not an accident. The particular place the bomb fell was not done by human design alone. That morning, according to A Journey to Nagasaki, a booklet published by The Nagasaki Testimonial Society, three B29s left Tinian Island with the lead plane, Bock’s car, carrying a plutonium bomb. One of the planes missed the initial rendezvous point. The two remaining planes then headed for Kokura, the second target destination. This time smoke obscured the view. The back up was Nagasaki. Tokiwa Bridge, the target in Nagasaki, was covered by clouds. Captain Sweeney, the pilot, continued northwards. An hour before noon there was a break in the clouds.
In his book, The Bells of Nagasaki, Dr. Nagai shares his anguish in graphic detail. The children in the many schools in the area, the nuns in prayer, his wife with the rosary melted beside her bones, the faithful Christians who had been purified by such intense suffering for so long – all these deaths were not accidental. Nagasaki’s hell was a sacred offering for peace. Its meaning was that this was not to happen again. Not to anyone.
Dr. Nagai believed that the bomb was carried by the wind and by God precisely to Urakami. The grammar checker on my computer rejects the words “the bomb was carried by the wind and by God” and offers instead, “God carried by the wind and the bomb.” Father Zabelka would have agreed with the computer. He says it was God who suffered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Calvary, the place where Christ suffered and died…is the holiest shrine in Christianity. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are Calvaries. For here Christ in the bodies of the “least” was put to death by exactly the same dark and deceitful spirit of organized lovelessness that roamed Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.” The cry of the ancient psalmist, and the cry of Christ, “My God my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” translates, in this context to “My God, my god, why have we forsaken Thee?”
We forsake each other, and we kill, partly because, like Father Zabelka on Tinian Island, we don’t know what we are doing. We don’t realize that when we kill, we are killing our own. What I understood this year, as I walked the few blocks of that sacred place from Dr. Nagai’s museum, to the cathedral, to the peace park, and the monument of the hypocenter, was that when we murder the other, we are murdering our own family, our Isaac, our Ishmael, our Jesus, our children, our futures. The enemy whose face is hidden from us, is our friend, our close relative, someone we love.
Could the catastrophe at Nagasaki have been prevented? Einstein, without whom the bomb could not have been made, did not know what his discoveries would unleash. He would rather have been born a peddler, he said, or a plumber. Two thousand years ago there was one who prayed that his killers would be forgiven because they didn’t know what they were doing. But today, we know what our weaponry is capable of doing.
On the walls of the museum commemorating Dr. Nagai’s life was his question. Who had done this? Who had brought this catastrophe to Nagasaki? His answer was, that we had done it ourselves. We humans had created hell. We were responsible. These were not words of hatred. He was a follower of the man who said, “Love your enemy.” The tiny one room house in which he wrote his books was called Nyokodo, “as yourself, house” from “Love your neighbour as yourself.”
“I have my mind,” he said as he lay dying. “I have my eyes, I have my hands.” With these tools still left to him, the bedridden Nagai, in the extremity of his suffering poured his passion for peace into his books, a line at a time. Exhausted after writing a line, he would pray, then continue with the next line. Dr. Nagai’s words, “I have my eyes, I have my hands,” remind me of a legend of the Goddess of Mercy. It is said that she was manifest in a compassionate princess, Miao Shan, the third daughter of a king of ancient China. Miao Shan’s fervent desire was to be a Buddhist nun. The king, however, wished her to marry.
At length, the king relented and Miao Shan entered a convent, where at the order of the king, she suffered grave hardship. But Miao Shan remained steadfast. Enraged that she would not relent, her father ordered the convent destroyed. Shortly afterwards, the king became ill and was informed that only medicine made from an arm and an eye of a person without anger could save him. Miao Shan gladly sacrificed both arms and both eyes for her father’s health. When the king went to give thanks to his benefactor he was horrified to discover it was his own daughter. She became the Goddess of Mercy. Like Miao Shan, Dr. Nagai offered his hands and his eyes in an act of sacrificial love.
There is another story that connects the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy with Christianity. Roughly between the sixth to the tenth centuries, as Buddhism spread eastward, the male Buddhist deity of compassion became known in China as Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. Nestorian Christians traveling the silk-road south and east from Persia were carrying statues of Mary, the mother of Christ. People, seeing these, took them to be images of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. In Japan, during the on going persecution of the hidden Christians, the presence of these statues in Christian homes signified to the authorities, that these were Buddhist homes. But unseen by the persecutors were crosses and crucifixes, symbols of Christianity, hidden within the Madonnas. Here is an instance, thanks to a confusion in the minds of persecuting authorities, that the mother of Jesus and the Goddess of Mercy stayed the hand of murder.
My first encounter with the Goddess of Mercy was in a dream in a Buddhist temple when I was visiting Japan in the early ‘90s. Before that dream, I had not given a thought to Her and knew nothing at all about Her. I described the experience in The Rain Ascends, as the narrator, Millicent Shelby, begins her journey saying, She came to me that spring in a dream and touched me in her evanescent way, saying that she, the Goddess of Mercy, was the Goddess of Abundance. Mercy and Abundance. One and the same. The statement shone in my mind with the luminosity of an altogether new moon.
It’s about a decade later now and the “altogether new moon” of that dream still shines in my mind, but even more strongly today. The Goddess of Mercy, is the Goddess of Abundance. I didn’t understand what the dream meant at the time, but today I recognize that both mercy and abundance are aspects of the same God of Abraham who demands our all. Today in our slavish devotion to our dream of abundance we have forgotten that without mercy there can be no abundance, and without abundance, there can be no mercy. The market fundamentalists of our day, like Christian fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists and Jewish fundamentalists, are willing and able to wage war, to sacrifice our collective children and the future. Without obedience to the voice of Mercy, our worship of Abundance is a nightmare, Isaac and Ishmael lie murdered, and we have a bloodthirsty Deity reigning over a planet of ashes and dust.
According to Kuan Yin: Myths and Revelations of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion, she, who has been worshipped for centuries on the island Pu To in China, is also unheeded these days. Today the sacred island of the goddess is ablaze with neon, resounds to karaoke and disco bars and has become a major place of prostitution. It is as if the secular has declared war on the divine feminine. This is not the work of communism but the consequence of the pursuit of consumerism. This seems to be the lowest ebb the sacred island has ever reached and we fear for the future of this unique place. Maybe Kuan Yin will have to perform a miracle on her own island – for little else seems possible in the face of such denigration.
How do we rediscover the power of Mercy in our day? Is it, as Carol Delaney asks, that we need a new myth? Or is the “passionate protection of the child” already present in the original story? It was the presence of mercy that stopped Abraham’s hand. She also empowered the hands of Dr. Nagai. I believe she continues to be active throughout the world, in distant unheralded islands, on street corners, in homes and in the towers. Hapless creatures though we are, I believe as we give her our all, she will lead us into the abundant way.

Joy Kogawa at the VPL: Emily Kato book launch, Aug. 5, 7:30 pm, Alice MacKay Room. Aug. 6, 11-3 pm, Promenade.
www.kogawa.homestead.com


Hiroshima Day 2005
Friday, August 5, National Nikkei Heritage Centre
6688 Southoaks Crescent, Burnaby (near Kingsway and Sperling)

Sixty years after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world continues to be threatened by nuclear disaster. In this family oriented commemoration and celebration of hope, participants are welcome to make paper cranes, the symbol of the anti-nuclear peace movement, or construct a paper lantern to be set afloat in the pond adjacent to the Nikkei Centre at dusk to commemorate victims of wars, past and present. All paper cranes will be contributed to the Vancouver Public Library’s Peace Crane Project.
The day will also include a special tribute to the memory of Kinuko Laskey.

7:00 pm Doors open - Crane & paper lantern construction.
7:30 pm Welcoming remarks - representatives of Vancouver & Burnaby,
Mary-Woo Sims, former BC chief human rights commissioner.
8:00 pm Multi cultural musical program - Harry Aoki and guest, First Friday Forum.
8:30 pm Professor Michael Wallace, UBC - UN anti-nuclear talks fail, what next?
8:45 pm Multi cultural music program.
9:00 pm Closing remarks & lantern ceremony.

Sponsored by:
City of Vancouver Peace and Justice Committee, Multi-Ethnic Coalition for Redress
Reconciliation & Peace in the Asia Pacific, Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens’ Association Human Rights Committee, StopWar.ca., Common Ground magazine