Academic literature on the topic 'Bombardment of Nagasaki-shi (Japan'

Contemplating with dread the slide toward war between Japan and the United States in the autumn of 1941, Joseph Grew, the American ambassador to Tokyo, noted gloomily in his diary: “Facilis descensus averni est”—the descent into Hell is easy. Events in Europe and China had already given eloquent testimony to that grim axiom, confirming all too clearly that among the first casualties of war are peacetime notions of morality. Grew's foreboding was more than justified. Before the Second World War would come to a close in the summer of 1945, it had become the most destructive conflict in human history, with fifty-five million dead, millions more broken, either physically or psychologically, thirty million refugees, and still millions more who had simply vanished. Continents had been ravaged, great cities laid waste, and a tidal wave of destruction left behind a landscape of unparalleled human suffering. A war that began with the major powers pledging to refrain from “the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities”—Hitler piously committed Germany to conduct the war “in a chivalrous and humane manner”—ended with a mushroom cloud over Nagasaki.

73 years ago, on the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American bomber had the sonorous name "Enola Gay" - it was named after the mother of the crew commander, and the deadly bomb with the affectionate name "Little Boy" contained 20 thousand tons of TNT equivalent. In a few seconds, the "Little Boy" claimed about 130 thousand human lives, most of which turned into radioactive dust, and tens of thousands of people were dishoused. Three days later, on August 9, the city of Nagasaki was subjected to a similar strike using a bomb with no less peaceful name "Fat Man", with equally terrible consequences [3]. According to some reports, the Americans, in order to achieve complete surrender of Japan, planned to carry out a total of three nuclear strikes, but as of early August 1945, the US military had only two deadly bombs at their disposal. At that time, few could have imagined how terrible and irreversible the consequences of a nuclear strike could be. The incidence of leukemia increased 18 times. The victims of this terrible bombardment continue to die from radiation sickness to this day, annually replenishing the list of victims by 5,000 names [1]. To date, the number of victims of the tragedy has approached 450 thousand. The US Air Force colonel, who gave the order to drop the bomb from an escort aircraft, soon went mad, and spent the rest of his days in a psychiatric hospital.

Spanish monarchs ruled a global empire encompassing millions of colonial subjects for nearly three hundred years. One key factor in the longevity of the Spanish Empire was its skillful integration of elements from an even longer-lasting, centralized Institution--the Catholic Church. Through a focus on San Felipe de Jesús, a Mexico City-born saint, this dissertation analyzes the pious imperialism of the Spanish Empire in the Catholic missions of Japan, the politics of beatification in Rome and local devotions in Mexico City. Funded by Philip II, Spanish missionaries spread across the Atlantic and then to the Pacific. The mission of Spanish Franciscans in Japan including San Felipe exemplified the orthodox and expansionistic tendencies of this movement. The friars’ uncompromising zeal caused them to reject Japanese society and authority, something which led to their executions in 1597. Spanish subjects thrilled to the martyrs’ inspiring story and supported their beatification cause. The Spanish king, too, actively promoted new holy figures in Rome for political and pious reasons. During the seventeenth century, more than half of the new beatified or canonized holy figures came from the Spanish Empire, including the Nagasaki martyrs. As each new saint earned a feast in liturgy, worship in Spanish territories began to disseminate not only Catholic values, but also divine favor toward the Spanish Empire and its monarch. The liturgical schedule of colonial Mexico City shows that Spanish Catholicism projected both Church and Empire across the Atlantic. As the Catholic Church had found, cults to saints formed effective imperial ties because they could also attract and adapt. Civic and religious leaders in Mexico City molded the cult to San Felipe to express municipal pride, to assert the city’s place in the Spanish Empire and to commemorate its contributions to Catholicism. Devotions to saints, then, captured the potentially-divisive power of identity to reinforce Empire and Church. Pious imperialism worked well until Bourbon-era reforms distanced the Spanish monarch from the devotional culture in Mexico City and interrupted the mediating power of saints’ cults. The Spanish Empire was less able to withstand shocks like the political instability of the early nineteenth century.
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