NAGASAKI - The Catholic Archdiocese of Nagasaki and others on Monday unveiled plans to bring the surviving head of a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary that was destroyed in the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki to the United States for the first time in 16 years.
The statue fragment will be brought to New York later this month for a conference to review the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the nuclear weapons were developed.
It is hoped the head will be put on public display at the U.N. headquarters and in Los Alamos.
It will be brought to the United States by a 15-member group consisting of Catholic clergy from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha. Among them will be Mitsuaki Takami, the 80-year-old archbishop emeritus of Nagasaki, whose mother was exposed to the atomic bomb while pregnant with him.
"We are not going with simply a victim mentality," he said, adding that the statue's head may appeal to Americans' "beliefs and conscience" by showing that nuclear weapons are inhumane and incompatible with Christian faith.
The group is scheduled to leave Japan on Nov. 26 and return on Dec. 10. It also plans to visit a museum related to the development of nuclear weapons, tour churches and speak with local residents.
The head was found in the rubble of the old Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki by a Catholic priest, who later took it to Hokkaido, where it was kept for many years before it was returned to the reconstructed church.
The last time the statue's head was brought to the United States was in 2010, when a review conference for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was held in New York.
