When my grandmother passed away unexpectedly, in 1986, I traveled from Tokyo to Omura, in the outskirts of Nagasaki, to attend her funeral. During the process of sorting through her possessions with close family members, I discovered a faded black-and-white photograph in a drawer. It depicted my mother, aged approximately five, standing beside a young pilot. His face displayed quiet resolve. “Is this you?”, I asked. My mother paused with a nod saying, “It’s me and one of the kamikaze pilots.” I asked her, “Why you and a kamikaze pilot?”
My mother shared fragmented recollections, providing context to the photograph’s silence. Then, her sister joined our conversation. My grandmother had become the pillar of the family during WWII since my grandfather’s enlistment, running a general store on the ground floor of their family home and offering a makeshift free inn for officers and pilots stationed in the nearby naval and air base.1 Officers and pilots would come to the inn, treating my grandmother’s inn as a place that resembled what they had left behind – life and family. My mother explained that the kamikaze pilots had often left younger siblings behind, prompting her and her siblings to stand in as the substitutes for the families the pilots would not see again.
In the final portrait, my mother looked innocent and appeared unaware that the pilot would soon vanish, or that Nagasaki would soon become the city annihilated by the atomic bomb code-named Fat Man. The image endures as sober witness to a period when innocence coexisted with sacrifice, on the precipice of historical catastrophe, only forty kilometers away. I realized in 1986 that I was in similar age to the young pilot, which underscored my own vulnerability. The photo’s tension between life and sacrifice stayed with me, not just as a family relic, but it held space in my heart for lessons that I would understand later in life.
Years later, I returned to Nagasaki Peace Park, the Atomic Bomb Museum, and Urakami Cathedral, home to the damaged wooden Madonna of Nagasaki statue that survived the atomic bombing. It was my first visit since a Grade 6 field trip. The statue was found just 2,000 feet from the blast site, and the Madonna became a powerful symbol of hope for the wounded, suffering, and dying. Later, it symbolized the resolve for nuclear disarmament.
On August 9, 1945, one of the spared lives was a parishioner, Dr. Takashi Nagai, a Catholic convert, a radiologist, and a professor at Nagasaki Medical College, who emerged from the ruins with scorched hands but tended to the burned and bleeding survivors. He carried each wounded on his shoulders, risking his own weakening body to save strangers from the very blast that scarred him. The loss of his wife and the knowledge that his two children would soon become orphans due to his leukemia drove him to prolific writing and spiritual reflections. He believed in the rebirth of life, and planted cherry trees in the Urakami district, where the Cathedral was located — the area most devasted by the atomic bomb. He became the sacrificial lamb who lays down its life, transforming a landscape of death and destruction caused by Fat Man into a hill of flowers and trees. This hill symbolizes resurrection through roots and petals from ashes and radioactive soil, and hope rising in the hearts of the survivors of an annihilated city.
My mother, standing in a photograph beside a kamikaze pilot fated for death, is framed within a parable of willing sacrifice—a youthful body offered in ritual devotion to a wartime ideology and Japan’s ill-fated mission. Yet that moment, frozen in sepia, also carries a cry for maternal tenderness overshadowed by the certainty of annihilation. Decades later the Madonna of Nagasaki offers a meaning, enduring as scorched witness to another epoch of war, death, and obliteration. Both icons—the pilot’s last portrait and the Madonna—hold space for embodied sacrifice and maternal grief steeped in memory of flesh-and-blood human existence.
Nuclear technology steered by AI—especially artificial general intelligence (AGI)—threatens to render sacrifice unrecognizable, driving decisions beyond empathy and beyond mourning. Meaning itself risks evaporation, leaving only sterile outcomes in a calculus where nothing sacred survives. Unlike WWII tyrants motivated by ideology or hatred, AGI pursues pure optimization—arguably more dangerous when misaligned with human values. Its code-rooted efficiency, algorithms that never die, and decisions made without moral weight erase the very notion of embodied suffering. The Madonna of Nagasaki, scorched and maternal, cradles a space for evocative reflection. In stark contrast, AGI-powered nuclear technology would hold only cold detachment and indifference—needless of anything beyond opaque, self-defined purposes.
Today as I write, August 9, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of Fat Man’s descent upon Nagasaki. In an instant, the city lost 40,000 lives—roughly 15% of its population—and another 43,000 by year’s end.2 But from scorched radiation, contaminated earth, and dark silence, the city now stands on a hill of flowers. Resurrection blooming through its grief. Dr. Nagai’s cherry trees sway over the soil where prayers were once whispered for the dead. Nagasaki holds the memory of sacrifice—for the living, for a future imagined in defiance of despair. On this day, 80 years ago, the city lost many of its finest sons and daughters. The cost was immeasurable, but the legacy is radiant.
Will humanity repeat the history? Will we unleash more dangerous and destructive weapons engineered by AGI? Let us pray that we have learned.
References
- Captured Omura Naval and Air Base and Sasebo City, Japan 1945
- How Many People Died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? – Newsweek (August 3, 2020)
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
