Picturing Hiroshima

In Japan, there were continuities between wartime image production and early post-war images of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The artist Akamatsu Toshiko (later known as Maruki Toshi), illustrated patriotic children’s books during the war but would go on to produce what became known as the Hiroshima panels with her husband Maruki Iri. The Marukis were able to avoid the censorship that had been imposed on film footage and photographs of what occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their mural-sized paintings, begun in the late 1940s, toured throughout Japan. The Hiroshima panels formed the core of exhibitions that sought to address the use of the atomic bomb and to educate the Japanese public about the dangers and possibilities opened up by the atomic age