Fat Man had fallen only half a mile from Urakami Cathedral, the largest and most famous church in Japan. The great stone edifice was almost completely leveled; only a few partial walls and one of the two bell towers stood among the rubble. The surrounding residential district was wiped out. For four centuries, since the arrival of the first Spanish and Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, the coastal region around Nagasaki had been a beachhead for Japanese Christianity. Since about 1700, the Urakami Valley had been the epicenter of this small but resilient community of faith, which had survived
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