Iri and Toshi Maruki were a young married couple living in Tokyo in August 1945, when American forces dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the first on the city of Hiroshima, killing more than 100,000 people and ushering in the nuclear age, the second three days later on Nagasaki, with tens of thousands more killed. Just days after the bombings, the couple went to Hiroshima, Iri’s birthplace. The family home, its windows blown out, had been converted into a makeshift hospital. Over the following weeks, they helped to care for injured civilians and cremate the dead.
Both were professional painters, Iri working in a traditional style of Japanese monochromatic ink painting called suiboku, and Toshi, trained in Western-style oil painting, working primarily as a book illustrator. For years, they wrestled with what they had seen in Hiroshima: piles of dead bodies, dismembered limbs, survivors burned beyond recognition. But eventually, they felt compelled to commemorate the bombings; at the time, there were no photographs, no film, nothing that visually documented what had taken place.
In 1950, they completed the first of what would become a series of 15 monumental panels—each 6 feet high and 24 feet long—graphically depicting the suffering and trauma.
Now, six of those panels are on display… READ THE COMPLETE BU TODAY STORY