I believe this Easter Season is a good time to treat of Godzilla. “Godzilla!” Yes, Godzilla. “Why?” say you. Because I finally saw one, a Godzilla movie, that is, and it jarred me into thoughts of redemption. “Redemption?” Yes, redemption. Let me explain.

At the very beginning of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, I took a trip and visited my nephew, a graduate student in archeology, for a few days, and on separate evenings we shared favorite movies. First, we watched a favorite of mine, The Greatest Game Ever Played, which I believe is one of the finest films ever made. He reciprocated by offering a movie that he thought I probably had not seen, Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One (2023) to be precise. I was a little surprised but managed to tamp down a decades-long dismissal of Godzilla that dated to my first being introduced to it in the mid-1960s by a loud, spoiled (three older sisters, enough said), youngest-of-five, rough-and-tumble, but amiable neighbor boy who’s enthusiasm for the subject fully baffled me at six or seven years of age. From the time of my introduction to them by the kid next door, I utterly could not understand the appeal of the Godzilla movies or their ilk. They struck me as so fake, unrealistic, and implausible that I just could not imagine why anyone would waste their time watching, let alone making them.

Still, as an old parent and a former teacher, I had learned over the years to show interest in and not to dismiss things that interested my children and students, and so I was in good practice not to dismiss this interest of my nephew. After all, he was an intelligent, thoughtful, and knowledgeable young man who deserved to be taken seriously. In addition, though his choice of film surprised me, it also intrigued me because my wife had told me years before that she and her family had watched and enjoyed Godzilla movies when they were new refugees to the United States after fleeing the fall of Saigon in 1975. These, too, were intelligent people. And though not Japanese, they were Asian. Maybe the Godzilla story touched something common among cultures of the far east that escaped my northern-European-heritage mindset.

What struck me most about the film fell within the realm of what my nephew had referred to as its humanity.

In recommending the movie, my nephew said that he had been interested in Godzilla movies from childhood, and that he appreciated the humanity of the film. He also pointed out, and emphasized, that they had only spent $12 million dollars making the film, compared to the hundreds of millions that would go into a Hollywood production of the kind, and that they had made several times that at the box office. He asked if I knew what Godzilla represented, and when I answered that I did not, he said that it was nuclear war. Who better to recognize the monstrosity of nuclear war than the Japanese.

So, given all of the above, I was content to settle in to a viewing of Godzilla Minus One, directed by Takashi Yamazaki. We watched the movie with subtitles, my nephew rejecting outright the idea of listening to the dubbed version. It was well made with good acting and higher-end production values. The plot was predictable (Son Two’s response to that observation was, “Really, Dad, Godzilla was predictable?” OK, OK), but that did not make it less entertaining. I thought it wise that they did not overly CGI the monster as to make him unrecognizable from the ancient guy-in-the-rubber-suit presentations known to my wife’s family, the kid next door, and other aficionados across the decades. As a neophyte to the genre, I am guessing that the star-shaped spikes that lit up and popped up when it was going to use its “heat ray” or “atomic breath” was an innovation, but that is speculation on my part.

What struck me most about the film fell within the realm of what my nephew had referred to as its humanity. The main character, Kōichi Shikishima, played by Ryunosuke Kamiki, fails to carry out his kamikize mission and lands on an island. A mechanic, Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), intuits Shikishima’s situation and expresses his sympathy for it. But that evening, the dragon Godzilla attacks the island, and Tachibana demands that Shikishima run to his plane and fire its guns on the monster. Shikishima does run into the danger and jumps into the plane but freezes and does not fire upon the monster who thereafter kills all the other soldiers on the island but Shikishima and Tachibana (we will drop a nod here to Son Two). So, now Shikishima’s guilt and shame are compounded by another failure with tragic results. Thereafter, it appears that every attempt to destroy Godzilla only serves to enlarge it and make it more powerful and destructive, which also ought to put Shikishima’s failure to destroy it into some perspective.

Suffice it to say that Shikishima’s survival and return to his destroyed home, the knowledge that his parents have been killed, and people’s reaction to his returning from the war alive—most dramatically presented in that of his neighbor Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando)—all exacerbate his profound guilt. This keeps him from moving on into his life that has been enriched by a young woman named Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned baby named Akiko (Sae Nagatani). He cannot find peace and live in the present free from his grievous past failings; instead he just carries on in what Noriko calls “your war.” Kamiki as Shikishima, in several scenes, evocatively conveys the intolerability, inescapability, self-loathing, fear, rage, obsession, and desperation of his condition. His failings, his sins, are just too great, too heavy for him to bear, too great for him to ever make proportional reparation. In this state, he takes a job that is high paying because it is so dangerous, that of working on a mine sweeper with obvious passive suicidal implications.

Wow! thought I—in light of Kamiki’s gut-wrenching portrayal of Shikishima’s plight—there is the human condition. And there is the human stuck without Christ. Only Christ could provide deliverance from the torment of Shikishima’s condition, and indeed the condition of every human being. (See “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament.”) And yet, it was apparent that Christ was not available to Shikishima in this Japanese film. Of course, the film—as perhaps films are wont to do in whatever culture—provides Shikishima an alternative deliverance. Fair enough. I continued to watch as Shikishima’s expected opportunity to redeem himself emerges in a way in which his old acquaintance, Tachibana, plays an essential role. (I am really trying to avoid spoilers here, but . . . aw shucks, folks, in another nod to Son Two, it’s Godzilla, after all.)

All right, so Shikishima is presented with the opportunity to destroy the monster that has multiplied its size and power exponentially—apparently due to mutations caused by exposure to radiation from United States’ nuclear weapons tests on Bikini Atoll—since he failed to try to eliminate it. So, in this fantastic story, the protagonist around whom the story is built, who has failed to die for his country, Japan, in which the mindset is that by so doing he has allowed its devastation, gets a chance to redeem himself and save his country in one epic, glorious, sacrifice.

His failings, his sins, are just too great, too heavy for him to bear, too great for him to ever make proportional reparation.

Well, that works out just great for Shikishima, and those in his orbit. But what about the other kamikaze pilots who did not carry out their missions? What about any other Japanese men who did not die defending their nation? I remember being fascinated as a boy by books about Japanese soldiers who had come out of the jungle twenty-five years or so after World War II had ended. Apparently they too had been fighting what Noriko would have recognized as their own private wars. I later read or heard that they had continued to live as soldiers in the jungle because they had not been killed and that to return alive from the war would have been considered a dishonor. What about all of them? They had not that one opportunity, which could be filled by one man, that Shikishima was privileged to get. So, no-one but Shikishima—and, to a far lesser extent, the very few who contributed in far lesser degrees to his action—could redeem himself from the onerous liability of his failings, his sins? Shikishima’s redemptive act in Godzilla Minus One may remove the threat of Godzilla and save the people from it (at least temporarily), but it does not redeem them. They are left mired in their failings, guilt, and shame. There is no larger-than-their-sins Godzilla left for them to slay, no glorious act that will wipe away their depravity. They are stuck in misery of mind, body, and soul.

But they need not remain so if St. Maximilian Kolbe—the Polish Franciscan who built a monastery at Nagasaki, Japan, and later died at Auschwitz after taking the place of a family man sentenced by the Nazis to starve to death—was right that the Japanese people truly are “a people who really search for authentic religion.” While viewing Godzilla Minus One, my limited knowledge of Japanese culture rose up in memories of reading Shusako Endo’s Silence some forty years before, and seeing the Martin Scorcese film adaptation some thirty years after that; and of learning about the Japanese Martyrs of Nagasaki and of the Kakure Kirishitan or “Hidden Christians” of Japan. In all of that was a sense of resistance of the Japanese to Christianity. Endo himself described in the Japanese a spiritual laziness that he referred to as a “mudswamp” that made them unsuitable for Chrisitianity. His Father Ferreira character, after his apostoasy in Silence, accepts the conclusion that the Japanese “never had the concept of God; and they never will.” And yet at the same time my memory presented accounts of Japanese Christian martyrs holding steadfast to the Catholic Faith through horrific tortures and executions and of the Hidden Christians who had kept alive that outlawed Catholic Faith without priests, at great risk of torture and death, for some 250 years until Catholic missionaries returned to Japan.

Yes, the Catholic Faith was outlawed, no little resistance there. St. Francis Xavier had introduced Christianity to Japan on 15 August 1549. By the time of the death of the incomparable ruler Oda Nobunaga in 1582 , there were 250 churches and 200,000 members of the faithful in Japan. But due to several developments, Japanese leaders began to see Christianity as a threat and began proscriptions and persecutions that led to the the six-hundred-mile march from Kyoto to, and crucifixion at, Nagasaki, of St. Paul Miki and twenty-five companions, who “died preaching and singing to the end,” on 5 February 1597, when there were some 300,000 members of the Catholic Faith in Japan. After 1598, persecution waned, but by 1614, Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa published the edict of destruction to eradicate the Catholic Faith. This led to the “great martyrdom,” on 2 September 1622, at Nagasaki, of fifty-two Christians either decapitated or burned alive. Jesuits and Dominicans who tried in following years to enter Japan on missionary efforts were horrifically tortured and martyred. Thereafter, countless numbers of the faithful were sought out and ruthlessly tortured and martyred and the Church outlawed until, not long after United States Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in 1853, Japan signed treaties with the United States, Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain, and France in 1858.

Finally, Christianity was once again allowed in Japan, and missionaries who had long sought to enter Japan arrived and began building churches. It was at such a church in Nagasaki, city of martyrs, on 17 March 1865, that fifteen native Japanese from the village of Urakami identified themselves as Christians to French missionary Father Bernard Petitjean, and indicated that there were as many as 50,000 Japanese Christians, a surviving remnant of the outlawed Church, who had kept the faith without priests and the sacraments, but for baptism, for some 250 years. These “Hidden Christians” (Kakure Kirishitan) had refrained from making themselves known to missionaries until they could be certain that they were of the true Faith by three criteria: that they honored the authority of the pope in Rome, that they venerated the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that their clergy practiced celibacy.

Coming out of hiding led to renewed persecution of the Hidden Christians of Japan in 1867, and some 3,700 Christians were exiled from Urakami, and more from other locations, when they refused to renounce their Faith. In 1873, they were allowed to return and the persecution stopped, but as many as a third of those exiled had died or did not return. Finally, on 11 February 1889, Japan recognized freedom of religion in a new Constitution. The next year, on 17 March 1890, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of the Hidden Christians, the bishops of Japan held their first synod in Nagasaki. Five years later, in 1895, the construction of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral was begun in Urakami on the site where for centuries Christians were forced to endure the fumi-e interrogations during which they were required to step on images of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary or be tortured, executed, or both. The cathedral was completed in 1925.

In addition to that history, my limited knowledge and imperfect memory served up additional evidence of a culture resistant to Christianity. I recall the young Japanese woman in power suit and heels who interviewed me in the early 1990s about a job in Japan disabusing me, in no uncertain terms, of the romantic notions people in the West entertained about Japan. She let me know that Japan was not just a land of meditating monks, green tea, and rock gardens, but was instead a nation of people committed to the dog-eat-dog realities of business. Of course by then, Japan had long ago traded its healthy pyramidal population graphs of the early 1950s for the irregular diamond graphs that have been edging year by year toward an inverted pyramid prelude to population collapse (see “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda”). It brings to mind the many articles I have seen over the years of Japan’s population sliding toward extinction.

There is no larger-than-their-sins Godzilla left for them to slay, no glorious act that will wipe away their depravity.

I remember reading in one article in particular some years (probably decades) ago, about Japanese women choosing the career path over marriage because it gave them freedom from the traditional subjection to a husband. Japanese women interviewed spoke of how they intended to never marry because they wished to be free from the tyranny of husbands and the demands of child rearing and housekeeping. At the same time, the article pointed out that Japanese women bought small funerary statues and set them out to honor children they had aborted. I remember being jolted by the poignant reality that these women knew and accepted that by choosing abortion they were killing their children, and they mourned and honored those children with statues, but they aborted them anyway. (See “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death.”) As nations all over the world wallowed in denial of their slow suicide through the culture of death, these women at least had the honesty to admit what abortion was. (See “The War on Women and Population Control.”) Therein, it occurred to me, lay an opportunity to present the alternative to the despair of abortion and the culture of death, that of hope through the culture of life, exercised in no small part in Christian marriage and the begetting and rearing of children. (See “Making Room and the Courage to Love.”)

And all that takes us back to the Catholic Faith in Japan. The Catholic Church commemorates the Japanese Martyrs on 6 February with the Memorial of St. Paul Miki and Companions, the twenty-six Christians who, in 1597, rather than slaying the monster in one glorious heroic act, accepted rejection by their countrymen and long, slow humiliation, torture, crucifixion, and death at their hands in imitation of and communion with their Savior, Jesus Christ. Whereas in Godzilla Minus One, Shikishima’s sacrifice (which involves an anticipated twist) may have saved the people from Godzilla, a representation of the evil of nuclear war, Christ’s sacrifice saves the entire human race from the totality of evil of which nuclear war is but a drop.

In the sacrifice of Christ we can all find redemption, relief, from even the worst of sins because the eternally begotten Son of God took on human nature itself and lived it through obedience even unto death on a cross. His was not an epic, fantastic, glorious, magnificent destruction of the monster in a spectacular blaze and blast. He did not die in a flash of glory but suffered ignominiously through abject torture and humiliation for hours: abandoned by his apostles; beaten, accused, and beaten some more; dressed and stripped, dressed and stripped, dressed and stripped again by strangers in public degradation; scourged naked, front and back, shoulders to ankles; crowned with thorns driven deeply into his skull and mocked and rejected by his own people; forced to carry his cross and fall flat on his face on the pavement over and over; nailed naked to that cross for all the world to see; rebuked, mocked, and vilified as he hung on that cross for hours from nails driven through his wrists and ankles; thus tortured to an unclean and scandalous death and even after that pierced by a pike in the heart.

That is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross that saved the crucified Nagasaki martyrs and the Hidden Christians of the underground church and that would save all those who were not able to take on Godzilla, and that would save Shikishima too, whether he took on Godzilla or not. For Shikishima’s plight is the plight of us all, though his may be more dramatically evident.

Our sins are too big for us to make satisfactory reparation. Unlike for Shikishima, the expanding resulting devastation from our sins will not present itself as some colossal monster that we will be able to slay to redeem ourselves and put all things right and bring peace to our souls. Neither can we conjure up and assault and slay a representation of our sins and the immeasurable damage they have wrought. We cannot make the monster big enough, and even if we could, we could not kill it in one heroic deed. Godzilla Minus One even hints at that reality in the survival of Godzilla’s essence. It is not about what deed we could do to redeem ourselves. It is about the deed that was done by the One who is the Christ. It is about joining ourselves to the redemption won for us by Jesus Christ in that deed. The sacrifice of the Son of God is big enough to atone for all of our sins. There is the redemption that frees us all from the weight of our sins and our sinfulness.

Man need not lie under the burden of sin and guilt so masterfully portrayed by Ryunosuke Kamiki in Shikishima’s anguish.

That deed, the sacrifice of Christ, was not instantaneous and glorious but agonizingly slow, brutal, dirty, grisly, ghastly, degrading, and appalling. It did not occur in the big city for maximum exposure but in a forgotten backwater of an ancient empire. What made the act fully redemptive and victorious was Who accomplished it. It was not the great deed that made the savior but the Savior who made the deed great. The Son of God lived out his life, despite all that evil could throw at him, in perfect obedience and, in so doing, redeemed all of human nature for all of eternity for any who wish to join themselves to him.

One can be overwhelmed by every bit of what Jesus suffered by meditating on the passion narratives of the gospels, or praying the Stations of the Cross, the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, or the Divine Mercy Chaplet. And though he could have stopped it at any moment and destroyed those who were tormenting him, on that cross he hung until he had wrung the very last moment he could out of life, thirsting every second to live life to the end and save every human soul in the obedience that redeemed human nature from the disobedience of the original sin of the first man. The Japanese martyrs grabbed onto and clung tight to that gift of salvation to the extremity of human endurance in imitative participation in and communion with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Like the martyrs across nations and races, they participated efficaciously in Christ’s sacrifice in a profound way through their suffering.

And the “humanity” of Godzilla Minus One, that so impressed my nephew, is the common ground for that salvation embraced by the Japanese martyrs, whether depicted in the profound, multifold suffering of body, mind, and soul that the war imposed on Shikishima and indeed all the people of Japan who lost so much; or the bitterness of Tachibana and Sumiko, but then their acts of understanding and kindness and those of Noriko and the minesweeper crew and others too, and even those of the tormented Shikishima; or the innocence and dependence of Akiko. That humanity of the Japanese people, so evocatively portrayed by these characters in Godzilla Minus One, that they share with all the people of the earth—and even the humanity that procures and sets out funerary statues for aborted children—avails them of the true salvation in Christ. And all those humans need to do to be redeemed by that sacrifice is to join themselves to Christ normally through the sacraments of the Church that Christ established on Peter and the Apostles and that lives on to the present day in the Catholic Church heroically represented by that portion kept alive by the Kakure Kirishitan to make it available to the Japanese people to this day.

For if Godzilla is to be understood to be nuclear war, then when it struck Japan, it struck that Church too. After generations of gruesome, cruel, unimaginable torture, and death, and being forced underground, and then coming out from hiding, and then being subjected to persecution again, and finally being allowed to practice the Catholic Faith again, the remnant church found itself almost at ground zero of Godzilla’s destruction. On 6 August 1945, the United States of America dropped the first nuclear bomb used in warfare, a uranium bomb called Little Boy, from the B-29 Bomber the Enola Gay onto the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated 70,000 people instantly, and 100,000 by the end of the year, and tens of thousands more of radiation poisoning over the years. Less than three miles from that blast, the Jesuit church Our Lady of the Assumption, though its stained-glass windows were blown out, was left standing amidst miles and miles of demolished buildings. More astonishing yet, eight Jesuits (the Hiroshima Eight) walked away from the bombing and lived into old age without the effects of radiation poisoning that soon killed the very few for miles around who survived the initial bombing. The eight attributed their miraculous survival to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and their daily rosary.

Three days later, Godzilla struck again when the United States dropped a plutonium bomb called Fat Man from the B-29 Bomber called Bockscar on Nagasaki, the traditional center of Japanese Catholicism and martyrdom, almost directly above the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary that had been erected in Urakami from 1895-1925, leading to estimates of 40,000 killed immediately and 70,000 by the end of the year, with thousands dying in the years afterward from radiation poisoning. The dead included 8,500 of Nagasaki’s 12,000 Catholics, many of whom were attending Confession before the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August. In a film I saw some years ago, Catholics of the area expressed their belief that the death of the faithful Catholics who were the successors of the Kakure Kirishitan were the ones who were truly worthy to unite their sufferings to those of Jesus Christ in the vein of Colossians 1:24 to bring about the end of World War II. Survivors rebuilt the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and other churches. And despite only one percent or so of Japan being Christian and only half of that Catholic, and Japan being considered one of the most secular nations in the world, St. Maximilian Kolbe (whose Franciscan monastery in Nagasaki survived the blast), before he was starved to death by the Nazis, not only said that the Japanese were “a people who really search for authentic religion,” but also, “I will never forget Japan; indeed, I always pray for it.”

The Japanese martyrs grabbed onto and clung tight to that gift of salvation to the extremity of human endurance in imitative participation in and communion with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Japan and its remnant Catholic Church survived Godzilla, but Godzilla Minus One leaves us with the ominous scene that Godzilla has not been fully destroyed, that some essence of it survives from which, we are left to consider, it can return to wreak more havoc. Fair enough, especially for a film made in the one nation that has been the target of not just one nuclear attack but two. God forbid there ever be another. Japan lost perhaps over 200,000 people to those two bombs, 3.1 million people to the whole of World War II, about four percent of the population. Still, as long as it lies dormant, Godzilla is not killing the Japanese. But something else is. As indicated above, as recently as 1953, Japan had a healthy pyramidal population graph. But that has been shifting slowly toward population collapse. That is not Godzilla’s doing. The population of Japan is not collapsing because of nuclear war. The Japanese are not being attacked by some gigantic, rampaging, roaring dragon with atomic breath from which they can be delivered by heroes like Kōichi Shikishima and companions. Instead, they are being seduced by an invisible, slinking, insinuating dragon with lying voice from which they can only be delivered by Christ and his Church.

Certainly the specter of nuclear war, like the germ of Godzilla, lies dormant among us ever able to rise up in inconceivable destruction at the decision or blunder of man. But throughout its dormancy, over decade after decade, the Japanese have been methodically killing themselves by falling prey to the devil’s deceitful seduction. The population of Japan is collapsing because of national suicide. Behind the gleaming cities, orderly society, efficient business, tidy homes, and tiny families lies the dark, ugly, chaotic, wasteful, filthy reality of the culture of death: abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, varied and assorted immorality, and other ever-evolving and ever-multiplying manifestations. Thus lurk death and destruction on a massive scale hidden behind the facade of honor, order, and cleanliness. One might say that Japan is committing hara-kiri, except there is no honor in this decades-long self-destruction. From this evil, Japan needs redemption, and no Shikishima—with all his friends and their wisdom, knowledge, cleverness, and courage—will be able to slay this beast. (See “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It.”)

But they do not need to. The Japanese can most effectively participate in true protection and deliverance by entering into the Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ and animated with the Holy Spirit, and participating in her sacraments. The redemption Japan (and indeed the entire world) needs has already been accomplished in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ. And it is readily available, normally through his Catholic Church, which he founded on Peter and the Apostles (e.g. Mat 16:13-19, 18:18) and endowed with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2). Redeemed by Christ, the Japanese can enter into the communion of the Church and avail themselves of the sacraments and reject the lies of the subtle dragon and his culture of death and embrace the culture of life that will renew the people and the nation. Christianity is no more foreign to Japan than it is to any place or people. The heroic Japanese Martyrs like Paul Miki and Companions and all of those Christians who underwent unspeakable tortures and death rather than relinquish their Faith; who kept the Faith alive underground during centuries of persecution; who were annihilated by the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and those who survived the blasts did not relinquish being Japanese to become Christian. Like peoples, nations, and cultures throughout history, they kept the best of who they were and brought it into the communion of the Catholic Church, which was further enriched by it.

And in doing so, they did not avail themselves of the redemption of the one man against Godzilla, they availed themselves of the redemption of the God-man against the devil and the entirety of evil. In that redemption, every single person who ever lived on the face of the earth is invited to participate no matter what evil he has committed. Man need not lie under the burden of sin and guilt so masterfully portrayed by Ryunosuke Kamiki in Shikishima’s anguish. By participating in the sacraments of the Catholic Church man is delivered from sin and death, vanquished once and for all, to new life in Jesus Christ.

A notable example exists in the person of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who though he was not Japanese was a committed practitioner of the culture of death. Dr. Nathanson, a self-professed atheist, organized in 1971 and ran the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health in New York. And he admitted that he presided over sixty thousand abortions in the course of about a year and a half before he recognized that he was murdering children. In his own words: “In any case, the change of mind began with the realization, the inescapable reality that the fetus, that embryo, is a person, is a protectable human life.” Sixty-thousand brutal murders of innocent, defenseless, dependent children. How could one ever be redeemed from such wicked carnage on that scale. In light of Shikishima’s guilt, shame, and denial, imagine the real-life anguish of Dr. Nathanson and his temptation to despair. But Nathanson sought the truth and turned his life away from the the evil of his past and turned it into work to end the culture of death. His conversion eventually led to Christ, the one person who could forgive and redeem him from all of that sin and guilt. And so he entered the Catholic Church in 1996. He said of his conversion, “No religion matches the special role for forgiveness that is afforded by the Catholic Church.” (More on Dr. Nathanson here.)

Forgiveness, redemption, and renewal are all available to those Japanese who follow the saints of their nation into the Catholic Church and embrace and live out the culture of life. Like all of us Christians who still must contend with the dragons big and small of evil in this fallen world, they can rest in the assurance that those dragons have already been defeated by the God-man, Jesus Christ, and that he and his warriors, like the Japanese martyrs, will help us fight our battles to fully participate in his victory. And participating in that victory as members of the Catholic Church, the Japanese can emerge from the culture of death to embrace and celebrate their fertility and the culture of life and be authentically and abundantly Japanese with a nation teeming with hope as evinced in countless fresh-faced children, a population pyramid turned right side up, and a people availing themselves of redemption from the vast ocean of evil of which Godzilla is but a drop.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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