Nagai also influenced the lives of non-Catholics: In 1978, thirty-three years after the bombing, a Japanese man told Catholic missionary Paul Glynn that Nagai’s writing, which he had stumbled upon in a public library, had changed his life. The man had been enraged with Japan’s leaders and his wartime teachers who had brainwashed everyone into believing that Japan was a divine nation that could never be conquered, and he agonized that perhaps “human effort and personal values were ultimately meaningless.” Nagai’s writings persuaded him to convert to Christianity and believe in a God “who is
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