After Atomic Bombings, These Photographers Worked Under Mushroom Clouds
A new book of photos documents the human impact of the bombings that ended World War II — and challenges a common American perception of the destruction in Japan.
A view of Hiroshima in September 1945, weeks after an atomic bomb destroyed the city.Credit...Yoshito Matsushige/Chugoku Shimbun/Kyodo
By Mike Ives Aug. 6, 2020 NYTIMES
By Mike Ives Aug. 6, 2020 NYTIMES
In August 1945, a Japanese newspaper sent a photographer from Tokyo to two cities that the United States military had just leveled with atomic bombs.
The photographer, Eiichi Matsumoto, had covered the firebombings of other Japanese cities. But the scale of the calamity that he encountered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he later recalled, was on another level.
At a Red Cross hospital near Hiroshima’s ground zero, he met victims dotted with red spots, a sign of radiation sickness. And on the desolate, rubble-strewn streets of Nagasaki, he watched families cremating loved ones in open-air fires.
“I beg you to allow me to take pictures of your utmost sufferings,” Mr. Matsumoto, who was 30 at the time, said he told survivors. “I am determined to let people in this world know without speaking a word what kind of apocalyptic tragedies you have gone through.”
Mr. Matsumoto, a photojournalist for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper who died in 2004, is among dozens of photographers who bore witness after the bombings, which forced Japan’s surrender and ended World War II.
Some of their images, banned until the American occupation ended in 1952, were eventually exhibited in museums and other venues across Japan. They also became fodder for antinuclear activists waging nonproliferation campaigns.
BELOW ARE SOME OF THE PHOTOS
THE WHOLE PHOTO ESSAY CAN BE READ HERE
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