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80 Years On: "Hiroshima Panels" Pass on Memories of A-Bombing

80 Years On: "Hiroshima Panels" Pass on Memories of A-Bombing

Yukinori Okamura, curator at the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, explains the work in the city of Higashimatsuyama, Saitama Prefecture, on July 4.
Yukinori Okamura, curator at the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, explains the work in the city of Higashimatsuyama, Saitama Prefecture, on July 4.

   Higashimatsuyama, Saitama Pref., July 28 (Jiji Press)--The Hiroshima Panels, which depict the hell experienced by atomic bomb victims, continue to draw viewers ahead of next month's 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the Japanese city.
   "These are paintings that allow everybody living on Earth in this nuclear age to imagine (the bombing) as a future that could happen to them," said Yukinori Okamura, 51, curator at the gallery that exhibits the work. "I want visitors to feel memories of history that speak to us on a life-size scale."
   The work, consisting of 15 folding panels, was painted by the late artist couple Iri and Toshi Maruki. Fourteen of the panels are exhibited at the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels in Higashimatsuyama, Saitama Prefecture, near Tokyo, with the remaining one at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, the other city atomic bombed by the United States in August 1945.
   The couple engaged in relief activities in Hiroshima soon after the atomic bombing and continued to paint pictures of the devastation for over 30 years, based on their experiences and stories from witnesses.
   The panels depict not only Japanese atomic bomb victims but also U.S. prisoners of war and Koreans who met the same fate, as well as the Fukuryu Maru No. 5 fishing vessel exposed to radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in 1954.

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AFP-JIJI PRESS NEWS JOURNAL


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