Our Lady of Akita: Sister Agnes Sasagawa and the Weeping Statue

The Seitai Hoshikai, the Handmaids of the Holy Eucharist, keep a convent at Yuzawadai, on the edge of Akita City in Japan. Bishop John Shojiro Ito of Niigata founded the community in 1970. In its chapel stands a wooden statue of Mary, about 3 ft tall, carved in 1963 by Saburo Wakasa.

On 12 May 1973 a new sister arrived. Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa was a convert from Buddhism. She was totally deaf.

12 June 1973. Sasagawa saw "brilliant mysterious rays emanate suddenly from the tabernacle." She reported seeing angels. On 28 June two red scratches in the form of a cross appeared on her left palm. A few days later they began to bleed.

6 July. The statue, she said, was "bathed in a brilliant light" and "became alive and spoke with a voice of indescribable beauty." The sisters saw a wound in the form of a cross on its right palm. It bled. Two more messages followed, on 3 August and 13 October. The last was the darkest: "Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful."

29 September. The wound vanished. The statue began to sweat, especially from the forehead and neck, a perspiration, Ito wrote, "spreading a sweet perfume."

4 January 1975. The statue wept. It wept again, sometimes on consecutive days, sometimes after long gaps. Each time the sisters prayed the rosary and a priest wiped the tears with cotton. The 101st and final weeping came on 15 September 1981, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.

Ito saw four weepings himself and twice tasted the liquid: "It was salty and seemed to me truly human tears." By his count about 500 people saw the tears, including the local mayor, a Buddhist. Tokyo Channel 12 filmed a weeping. Cotton from the tears went to the forensic medicine departments of Akita University and Gifu University, and was judged human body fluid. Kaoru Sagisaka, a forensic specialist, found it "identical to human tears."

A first commission, in 1976, said it was "not in a position to prove the supernatural events." In 1981 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was "unfavorable to the events." Ito pressed on, and on 22 April 1984 he wrote: "I recognize the supernatural character of a series of mysterious events." He met Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988, and what was said remains disputed. In 1990 Archbishop Peter Shirayanagi of Tokyo said "the events of Akita are no longer to be taken seriously."

No source reports a finding of fraud, though some suggested Sasagawa was unconsciously producing the fluids. Ito rejected this because, he wrote, the tears flowed while she was sleeping and while she was 400 kilometers from Akita. Critics such as Mike Lewis look elsewhere. The statue copies the Lady of All Nations, an apparition the Church judged not supernatural. And the final message echoes a fabricated "third secret" of Fátima printed in 1963.

In 1999 the nuncio, Ambrose de Paoli, stated that the Holy See had never given any approval to the events or the messages. Yet Ito's approval was never reversed in Niigata. A shrine was completed in 2002. Sister Agnes Sasagawa died on 15 August 2024, aged 93.