In the immediate aftermath of the Asia/Pacific War, few Japanese publicly expressed remorse or guilt for what Japan had done to others in the course of empire and military aggression. The overwhelming preoccupation, civilians and military alike, was with their own misery and suffering. Among the exceptions was Kurihara Sadako, born to a farm family in the region of Hiroshima, 1913. She is important not only for her witness to the atomic bombing in Hiroshima but also for early acknowledgment of Japanese atrocities in China.

Kurihara (born Doi) first composed poetry in her early teens and, at age eighteen, married a fellow villager, Kurihara Tadaichi, who had become involved in leftist causes while in Tokyo. They lived in such poverty in Hiroshima in the 1930s that they once thought of emigrating to Brazil. Their son died at a young age, but two daughters survived childhood. Kurihara contined to write poetry and gained a local reputation. During the Pacific War, she was mobilized at the neighborhood level, as were all women, for various homefront duties. For a short time in 1940, her husband, Tadaichi, was recruited into the army and sent to China. There he saw for himself Japanese military brutality, an experience he shared with Sadako and others when he was released from duty for reasons of illness. Later in the war, 1944, he was conscripted as a civilian laborer for work in a factory not far from Hiroshima. The family moved close by and was living only two and half miles (four kilometers) from what would become the center, or ground zero, of the atomic bomb blast, August 6, 1945. At home in her kitchen early that morning, Kurihara saw the flash. As a hibakusha, or survivor of the atomic bomb, she was among the first to write and publish atomic bomb poems. "Let Us Be Midwives-An Untold Story of the Atomic Bombing," and "Nightmare-Going to the Aid Station to Bring Home a Corpse," both appeared in the first volume of a new journal, Chugoku bunka (Culture of Central Japan), March 1946. The editor—and co-founder with her of the magazine—was Kurihara's husband, Tadaichi, and the entire issue was devoted to the bomb. For his efforts, Takaichi was reprimanded by local Allied censors stationed in Fukuoka (a major city in northern Kyushu), in this case Americans, but he was not fined.

By July 1946, Kurihara had prepared a small collection of poems, written both in modern free verse form and in traditional tanka (31 syllables in alternating lines of 5/75/7/7), entitled Black Eggs (Kuroi Tamago). As required, she sent the galley off to Fukuoka for pre-publication approval. It was written on recycled poor quality paper originally used for receipts. The anthology contained several previously unpublished wartime poems, together with new ones written since Japan's surrender. In the tanka group alone, censors found eleven poems to be objectionable in whole or in part. They marked up the proof in red ink and deleted in entirety one of Kurihara's new poems, "Handshake," addressed to victorious American soldiers. They cut two wartime poems, including, "What is War" (1942). They also removed several lines in a new poem on the atomic bomb. This prompted her voluntarily to eliminate the entire poem as well as to drop out of caution a few additional ones she had prepared for the 1946 edition. Surprisingly, censors considered other poems relating to the bomb to be acceptable, such as Kurihara's previously published verse, "Let Us be Midwives," in time her best known poem. The anthology, however, would have a limited circulation; only 3000 copies were put into typeset in August. The suppression in 1946 of Kurihara's poetry, both voluntary and forced, serve as an excellent example of what Japanese survivors longed to say about the bomb but could not—even as they searched often in agony for the words to convery unimaginable experiences and feelings. Until late 1949, when the Occupation ended formal censorship, not only atomic bomb poems but also atomic bomb fiction, non-fiction, painting, film and photography, whether produced by survivors or by non-survivors, were either suppressed, partly censored, self-censored, or circulated clandestinely.

Black Eggs did not appear in complete, unexpurgated form until 1983, when it was reconstructed in whole by using the original gallery preserved in the Gordon W. Prange Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland. By then, Kurihara, a long-time activist for peace and human rights, had won a modest national reputation as a poet and become perhaps better known outside of Japan. Remembering the atomic bomb remained a passion, but over the years her poems also spoke consistently of Asian victims of the Japanese and reached out to include the Holocaust. Her poems too can be read for many other themes—family life, friendships, reconstruction, and the emperor system.