The Stream, Robert Corzine: Sixty-eight years ago yesterday Paul Takashi Nagai, scientist, professor, convert, and poet, left this world.
Born in 1908 and raised in rural Japan in traditional Confucian and Shinto religion, Takashi imbibed the materialist assumptions of his professors while studying to be a physician. “I was so sure that there was no such thing as a soul,” he wrote. But when his mother died, “my mother’s eyes told me that the human spirit lives after death. I could not but believe this. All this was by way of an intuition, an intuition carrying conviction.” Story is here.
