A Jesuit survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is receiving a long overdue but timely introduction, or reintroduction, to Americans. The biography of Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle, S.J., tells the tale of a man who dedicated his four-plus decades of life after the bombing to bringing Zen meditation into the Catholic Church and creating a cathedral in Hiroshima dedicated to peace.
Jesuit and Zen Master: A Life of Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle, by Ursula Baatz, first appeared in German more than 20 years ago. As someone who once interviewed Enomiya-Lassalle about his experience of the bombing and then read some of his works, I found it strange that no U.S. publisher had picked up the book until this year.
It turns out that among those who encountered Zen through Lassalle’s influence and thought is the former governor of California, Jerry Brown, himself a one-time Jesuit in training. Brown wrote the foreword for an English translation of Baatz’s biography, which was published by Orbis Books in February. An acknowledgment by Baatz indicates that Brown also facilitated the translation of her original biography from German.
Enomiya-Lassalle’s life was one that pursued peace both concretely, through construction of a cathedral in Hiroshima, and intangibly, through the spread of Zen meditation, interreligious dialogue and faith in the traditions of mysticism.
Enomiya-Lassalle, who grew up as Hugo Lassalle in Germany and added Enomiya to his name when he became a Japanese citizen after many years in the country, was well known in Germany and neighboring parts of Europe. Large crowds would attend his lectures on Zen in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, and today, as Baatz notes in the introduction, almost every major city in Germany has a Zen meditation center, many of them Christian. Often the people practicing Zen owe their presence in some way to Enomiya-Lassalle’s influence.
In this country, Enomiya-Lassalle, who died in 1990, is recognized as a formative spiritual leader by some Zen teachers and theologians like Robert E. Kennedy, S.J., a longtime professor at St. Peter’s University in New Jersey; Ruben Habito, who taught at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology; and Unitarian-Universalist James Ishmael Ford. Largely, however, Enomiya-Lassalle’s role in both Zen and the response to the world’s first atomic bombing is forgotten here, even among Catholics.
In contrast, Enomiya-Lassalle, who is still often known as Lassalle, was introduced, more or less in passing, to Americans and other English-language readers in John Hersey’s classic 1946 account of the bombing for The New Yorker. Although mentioned nearly 20 times, he was only identified as “Father Superior LaSalle.” He had a minor but dramatic role centered on his evacuation to receive medical aid at a suburban Jesuit property where Pedro Arrupe, S.J., who had studied medicine before becoming a Jesuit, had set up a makeshift medical clinic.
During the postwar years, Enomiya-Lassalle’s drive to build the World Peace Memorial Cathedral in Hiroshima received attention from both the U.S. Catholic press and general publications, including The New York Times, which noted a large anonymous donation to the construction project by an American. The donor, whom I eventually identified as Thomas A. Bradley, a prominent Catholic philanthropist in New York City, was quoted in a March 1949 news item from NCWC news service, a predecessor of Catholic News Service, as saying, “Americans dropped the bomb, so Americans should help build the memorial.”
Baatz calculates that Enomiya-Lassalle made 27 roundtrips by train between Hiroshima and Tokyo in 1951, often on overnight trips where he would sometimes ride standing up because he wanted to save the cost of a reserved seat. She quotes another Jesuit as saying that Lassalle learned to sleep standing up. Often his fund-raising trips would end in rejection, which he found humiliating.
The 1954 dedication of the Memorial Cathedral of World Peace (which is the seat of the Diocese of Hiroshima and is also known as Assumption of Mary Cathedral) attracted Japan’s Prince Takamatsu, Catholic and Buddhist clergy, diplomats and the press. The success brought Enomiya-Lassalle great joy, but he was saddened to be informed, at the end of the day, that he would not be pastor of the parish there.
As Baatz recounts movingly, Enomiya-Lassalle, then 57, considered various options for living “the last stage of my life,” including a return to his early work for social justice among Japan’s poor. But he eventually concluded he should pursue his longing for union with God and throw himself into the pursuit of Zen meditation, which had interested him even before coming to Japan.
As Enomiya-Lassalle studied and practiced Zen under Buddhist monks and masters, he quickly began work on his first book about Zen and introduced retreats combining traditional Christian prayer with sittings to practice meditation. In the mid-to-late 1950s, those were extremely provocative ideas in the church. Baatz shows that Enomiya-Lassalle nevertheless was generally able to move forward with his Zen work. He received considerable support from Arrupe, who became the provincial over all Jesuits in Japan and would soon head the order worldwide.
In 1986, Jerry Brown, who had already finished the first of two eight-year runs as governor, met Enomiya-Lassalle. By then, a considerable number of Catholic and other Christian spiritual leaders had taken up the practice of Zen, often directly influenced by Enomiya-Lassalle. As Brown describes it, however, the meeting was almost comically happenstance. Brown writes that he had heard of Zen while a Jesuit novice and had occasionally visited a Zen center in San Francisco but had never taken “the time to practice zazen, the unique form of sitting meditation that forms the heart of Zen Buddhism.” During a short stay in Tokyo after a trip to China, he decided “to see if I could find a Jesuit who knew something about Zen.” He went directly to the city’s Jesuit-run Sophia University, where he asked a receptionist if one of the priests could talk to him about Zen.
Brown was soon engaged in a lengthy discussion with the highly regarded theologian and Buddhism scholar Heinrich Dumoulin, S.J. Eventually, Dumoulin suggested that if Brown wanted to talk to someone who practiced zazen, he should meet Enomiya-Lassalle. Brown sat for hours listening to Enomiya-Lassalle. Within weeks, Brown returned to Japan for six months mostly devoted to week-long retreats, known as sesshins, with up to 10 hours a day sitting in meditation. Some of those retreats were at a center, Shinmeikutsu, which Enomiya-Lassalle established outside Tokyo. Enomiya-Lassalle celebrated Mass each morning. Brown recalls that at the consecration, “I strongly felt that ‘my body’ included the host, Father Lassalle, and everyone in the hall.”
That year, 1986, was also the year I met Enomiya-Lassalle. The interview ended up producing a front-page story in my Seattle-area newspaper at the time, The Everett Herald. Beyond that, I, like Governor Brown, found the encounter deeply inspirational. I also briefly visited Enomiya-Lassalle at the retreat house outside Tokyo a couple of weeks later. I have participated in zazen only twice, once at Sophia in 2009 with Father Klaus Riesenhuber, the Jesuit who initiated the project that commissioned Baatz’s biography. Yet Lassalle’s faith, his writings on Christian mystics and Zen mysticism, as well as Baatz’s various writings about him, have all provided me decades of inspiration.
Among atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha, as they are known in Japanese, there is broad support for both the abolition of nuclear arms and the pursuit of peace in all situations. For some, those causes are very political; for other people, those causes largely transcend politics. Enomiya-Lassalle was probably somewhere on the less political end of the spectrum. In 1960, when Japan was in turmoil over its military ties with the United States, he lamented the politicization of the observance of the anniversary date of August 6 by some. Speaking at a Hiroshima memorial that was broadcast across Japan, he said: “In order to keep peace in the world we must keep peace in our minds. And this is not attained through politically inclined peace movements.”
In 2009 while in Hiroshima on a Fulbright research grant, I interviewed Setsuko Maria Hattori, a survivor and longtime parishioner of the cathedral church who knew Enomiya-Lassalle well. She talked about the politicization of peace efforts but also praised the Mayors for Peace, an international grassroots effort led by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to abolish nuclear weapons and promote a culture of peace. It is probably fair to speculate that Lassalle would share similar sentiments, and maybe he would be worried about the expiration in February of the last remaining nuclear treaty between the United States and Russia.
In his foreword, Brown echoes concerns about politics and peace. Baatz, he writes, shows how Enomiya-Lassalle’s life focused on “individual practice and direct experience—experience of the deep reality that unites all human beings. When so much political thinking is encased in notions of winning and competing, of them against us, nothing could be more timely than this heartfelt account.”
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