In postwar Japan, Akamatsu Toshiko (1912-2000) and Maruki Iri (1901-1995), wife and husband, would become famous as painters of the atomic bomb. Together, they belong among the greatest artists of the 20th century. As a team, they are unparalleled. Recognition by the public and critics, however, was long in coming. As in the case of literature, it was difficult to develop and gain respect for this new genre of activist witness to the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Before the Marukis met and joined their talents in creating the Hiroshima murals, Toshi had a modest prewar career as a Western style oil painter. Iri was an artist in the older tradition of ink painting. Toshi was born in Hokkaido to a Budhdist family. Her training in modern art was in Tokyo at a women's art institute. In the late 1930s, she had overseas experience in Moscow and in the Marianas. Toshi became Iri's 5th or 6th wife, according to some accounts. Whatever the correct figure, they married in 1941 and remained together to the end of their long and productive lives. Neither collaborated with the war effort and suffered impoverishment accordingly. Whatever tensions they later experienced in melding their very different painting styles, they were both committed to peace activism. Eventually, they constructed a Peace Gallery outside of Tokyo for their many large-scale murals and opened it to public tours. In a separate postwar career, Toshi would also write and illustrate many children's books, including books about Hiroshima. She did not believe that children were too young to hear the story of pika-don, as she called the flash of the atomic bomb.

Toshi, as she reveals in interviews and oral histories, joined Iri in Hiroshima in mid-August 1945. With great difficulty in finding transportation, he had gone there shortly after the dropping of the bomb to see after his family, arriving just three days later. Both would be witnesses to the enormous devastation and loss of lives. After their return to Tokyo and considerable brooding, they made their joint decision in 1948 to paint the bomb. They would try to do the impossible: bear witness to the bomb. Aware of the Occupation's prohibition against criticism of Americans and the Allies, they joined their talents in privately creating "Ghosts," in 1950, followed quickly by two other murals, "Fire," and "Water." Their focus was on the human body, not rubble or ruins. By then, Occupation controls of Japan's media had been lifted, but artists and writers remained cautious. The Marukis decided on a showing of their first mural in Hokkaido, Toshi's birthplace. Additional murals in 1952 were "Atomic Desert" and in 1954, "Bamboo Grove" and "Relief."

The Marukis brought their art to the United States in 1970-71, where it was displayed in New York and other places; it had already been shown much earlier in Europe, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. In a remarkable odyssey of the mind and conscience, they would over time come to bear witness not only to Japan's victimization but expand their vision to incorporate American and Asian victims of total war as well. In their later years, they turned to other forms of dehumanization and to environmental desecration, painting for example the Holocaust and the Minimata Disease.