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| (left) Urakami Cathedral cross, Nagasaki, on display at Wilmington College's Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection until 2019 (my photo); (right) graphic from Wilmington College's Peace Resource Center (source). |
Last week's post considered some of the political and spiritual difficulties World War II posed for Quaker colleges in the USA. Among the specifics of that story was the welcome that those colleges extended to a group of Japanese American students whose families had been forced into relocation camps by the notorious Executive Order 9066.
Thanks to an article posted today on the Web site of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "The political implications of Hiroshima’s scarred 'maidens'," by Alex Wellerstein, I've been thinking about other Quaker involvements with Japanese and Japanese Americans—and the nuclear bombings—originating in that war.
First in chronological order were American Quakers who had special ties to Japan before the war, and who became advocates for the incarcerated Japanese and Japanese American families in wartime. The case I knew best was Herbert Nicholson, whose nephew Ed Nicholson used to tell us stories about his uncle.
(Ed died in 2018, and his wife of 63 years, Chris Nicholson, just died this past July 29. Aside from many other ties between the Nicholsons and Judy and me, they were great encouragers of our service in Russia.)
Another Quaker advocate for incarcerated Japanese people and their families was Floyd Schmoe of University Friends Meeting in Seattle. After the war ended, he expressed his concern for war-torn Japan and the consequences of the atomic weapons by beginning a project called Houses for Hiroshima. Of all the people mentioned in these stories, Floyd was the only one I met personally, thanks to my work with Friends World Committee in the 1980's.
The "Hiroshima 'maidens'" story mentioned above, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, also had a Quaker connection. During the young women's stay in the USA for plastic surgery, they were accommodated by Quaker families, and spent time at Pendle Hill in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. More details in this Wikipedia article.
Those years—the 1950's—were a peak time for hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean, which led to a series of protests against those tests, the weapons being tested, and the radioactive pollution resulting from the tests. Barbara Reynolds and her husband Earle were among those who sailed into the test zones in protest. She later established the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection at Wilmington College in Ohio, USA, part of the college's Peace Resource Center. Judy and I got to know and appreciate the work of this center during the years we lived in Wilmington.
One of the remarkable exhibits in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection was a charred cross from the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki. In 2019, as described in this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists post, the director of the Peace Resource Center, Tanya Maus, accompanied the cross on its journey home to Nagasaki.
There is a gap in this very brief summary: the experiences of Japanese Quakers themselves during the war. The only Japanese Quaker meeting I've personally attended, the one in Osaka, was founded after the war. I have family ties to Japan—my mother was born and raised in Kobe—but, sadly, those ties don't connect with Quakers. My mother, having survived the war and eventually moving to Germany and then the USA, never spoke to me about her war years. Her primary political concern in my childhood years was the threat of Communism.
I'd love to have more examples of connections among these themes—Quakers, Japan and Japanese people, and World War II. Please share additions and corrections.
God bless the memory of those who risked everything for peace and justice in those brutal years.
I mentioned our own short visit to Hiroshima here.
Why I got sour on Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemorative events. (I'm not necessarily proud of it....)
David Harrington Watt and Marian Ronan in Friends Journal: "The work continues: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the struggle against nuclear weapons."
A Wikipedia summary of the debate for and against the use of atomic bombs in World War II.
Nuclear History: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the stories we must never forget—an online presentation by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Tuesday, August 18, 10:15 a.m. U.S. Central Time via YouTube.
Ezra Klein talks with Jasmin Sun about the peculiar challenges of campaigning for and against AI-related data centers.
Kathryn James: "Why is Anthropic Destroying Books?" (And why is it considered legal?)
From Friends Peace Teams: "Peace and War in Lviv, Ukraine." "...The nervous system adapts...."
More blues from Denmark: Delta Blues Band, "Yonders Wall."
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