Macao’ sister-city of Nagasaki was the center of Japan’s Roman Catholic faith and held the largest Roman Catholic church in Asia. One of the Church's most renowned saints, St Francis Xavier, founded the community, while the Jesuits governed it from 1580 through the brutal repressions beginning in 1614. Nagasaki’s relationship to Macao has been reinforced up until the present era through the Sao Paulo Ruins, which is actually the ruin of the ‘Church of the Mother of God’ (Igreja Mater Dei), to which Japanese Catholics from 1602 to 1640 contributed extensively. In Macao also are the remains of Japanese Catholics martyred in the Tokugawa repression.
By the summer of 1945 the Pacific War brought Japan to its knees with the destruction of its naval fleet and the obsolescence of its army air force. Despite suicidal Japanese defensive efforts, the US military had captured Okinawa, a close base to Japan from which to attack Japan’s home islands. Fifty-eight of Japan's largest cities had already been destroyed through firebombing. Japan was attempting to negotiate surrender through at least three routes, including the Vatican.
The plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9th August 1945, used a new and more powerful technology than the uranium bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Plutonium became the basis for the nuclear arms race that followed. Designed to break the faith of Japan elites in continuing the war and likely to adversely impact an institution believed to have contributed to the rise of right-of-center movements of the 1920-30s, the bomb was unleashed on top of the undefended Catholic, Urakami Community well north of the Nagasaki city center, killing as many as 140,000. This article explores the obscured nature of the bombing.