In a remote convent in Akita, Japan, a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary wept blood, sweat, and tears one hundred and one times between 1975 and 1981. The fluids were collected and analysed by independent forensic scientists. They were human. They came from three different blood types.

The statue stood in the chapel of the Handmaids of the Eucharist, a small religious community outside the city of Akita. It was a one-metre wooden carving made in 1963 by a local woodcarver named Saburo Wakasa. He modelled it on a Dutch Marian image. Twelve years later, his statue began to bleed.

It began in January 1975. A wound appeared on the right palm. Then the statue began to sweat. Then it began to weep. The principal witness was a nun named Sister Agnes Sasagawa. The fluids were collected on cotton swabs and sent to scientists. The weepings happened a hundred and one times over six and a half years. The last was on the fifteenth of September, 1981.

Professor Eiji Okuhara at Akita University performed the first analyses. He forwarded samples to Doctor Kaoru Sagisaka, a non-Christian forensic specialist in Tokyo. The fluids were human. The blood was type B. The sweat was type AB. The tears were type AB. Three different blood types from a single source. In any living human, all three fluids carry the same type. Sagisaka could not explain the result. Japanese national television broadcast a weeping live in December 1979.

Sister Agnes had been certified incurably deaf in 1973 by two separate Japanese hospitals. In May 1982, her hearing returned. Doctor Sawada, who had originally certified her deafness, signed a new certificate stating no abnormality in either ear.

The local bishop of Niigata approved the events as supernatural in 1984 after eight years of investigation. The Vatican has never decreed against him. The forensic samples are still archived. The statue is still in the convent. No one connected to it has ever admitted a forgery.

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