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New book features A-bomb paintings created by Hiroshima high school students

by Junji Akechi, Staff Writer

A non-fiction book titled Peace Baton will be published on June 17 by the Kumon Publishing Company. The book features the activities of students from Motomachi High School, in Naka Ward, which involve listening to the experiences of A-bomb survivors and making paintings about the atomic bombing based on what the survivors have told them. On June 12, Masazumi Yugari, 60, the author of the book and a journalist living in Tokyo, held a news conference at Hiroshima City Hall and talked about his hopes for the book by saying, “I hope that this unique and unprecedented approach to handing down the tragedies of the past to succeeding generations will come to be known widely in the world.”

In this “A-bomb painting” project, students spend about a year engaged in ongoing dialogues with A-bomb survivors and then transforming their testimonies into oil paintings. The project began at Motomachi High School in fiscal year 2007, and so far 118 students and 37 A-bomb survivors have taken part.

Mr. Yugari learned about this project while in the process of gathering information about the post-war restoration of Hiroshima, which he began at the end of 2014. He interviewed mainly four pairs of A-bomb survivors, including Mitsuo Kodama, 86, and former Motomachi High School students. In the book, Mr. Yugari describes the progress of the students’ work as they first listened to the A-bomb survivors’ accounts and sought to identify with their experiences as deeply as they could, then considered how to depict these experiences on canvas, and took great pains to finally complete their paintings. This process seems to have played a part in helping the students mature.

Emphasizing the idea incorporated in the title of the book, Mr. Yugari said, “In order to pass on the past tragedies of disasters and wars to future generations, the people who are directly affected should not be the anchor (of a relay).” The intended readers of the book are upper-grade elementary school students and above. Kazunuki Hashimoto, 60, a teacher at Motomachi High School who also attended the press conference, said, “I hope that students will be encouraged by this book to feel that they can take some kind of action, too.” The book, priced at 1,620 yen, consists of 160 pages and contains 12 colored illustrations.

(Originally published on June 13, 2019)

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