Birds without wings. Ghosts shuffling forward, hands stretched weakly before them. Monsters. Naked figures wreathed in flames.

These are hell scenes, and to persons familiar with Japanese art they may call to mind the medieval Buddhist scroll paintings of damnation, where the torments of hell are as gruesomely varied as Dante or Bosch ever imagined them to be. In actuality, however, these particular scenes are recollections from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where hell and the modern age fused in August 1945. There is no more prevalent response in the written recollections of survivors of the two atomic bombs than the expression, in some form, that "it was like hell," or "hell could not be more horrible than this." Only in a way that was itself grotesque did the scenes of 1945 differ subtly from the Buddhist eschatology. In the old scrolls, monsters were the keepers and tormenters of hell; in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the victims themselves were disfigured and turned into monsters.

The witnesses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know they can never adequately convey the enormity of what they beheld, and like survivors of the Holocaust in Europe, they are sensitive to the danger of trivializing a colossal tragedy. Nonetheless, many have felt a compulsion to try to share what they have seen-to risk inadequate communication in order to prevent a more terrible danger: forgetting. For the pressures to erase Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the historical consciousness are as compelling as the need to remember and understand Indeed, as time passes and new generations come on the scene, memory fades; and as new nationalisms, alliances, and technologies of destruction are promoted, the past is deliberately and selectively obscured. This is true everywhere, and as counter to such trends the Japanese have created, in the decades since 1945, a body of "atomic-bomb literature" that by 1983 extended, in one publisher's collection, to fifteen volumes. They also have produced a corpus of paintings and drawings that transcends the vision of hell and ultimately the atomic-bomb experience itself, and in many ways is without precedent in the history of art.

The visual art that derives from Hiroshima and Nagasaki falls into three broad categories in Japan: illustrations for young people; the drawings and paintings of survivors; and the fine art of professional artists. All of these categories have the capacity to impress unforgettable images on the viewer. Since the late 1960s, millions of Japanese schoolchildren have been moved by Nakazawa Keiji's largely autobiographical Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), the pioneer illustrated depiction of Hiroshima for young people; and in the mid-1970s, a stunning collection of drawings by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was assembled by NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting corporation, and made widely known through television broadcasts and exhibitions throughout the country. By far the most sustained, intricate, and important graphic work associated with the theme of nuclear destruction, however, is the sequence of murals painted collaboratively over the course of more than three decades, beginning in 1950, by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, husband and wife and each an esteemed artist individually. Here the highest standards of the painterly tradition are wedded to contemporary themes in ways never ventured before.

...[T]he Marukis had no models to turn to when they decided to paint what they had seen in Hiroshima; nor did they have the slightest inkling that their initial preoccupation with nuclear war would eventually lead them to broader visions of death and destructiveness, and beauty as well. Although their joint work is immeasurably enriched by traditional techniques of Oriental painting, there are no Japanese or Chinese artists with whom to compare them. Comparisons arise more naturally within the European artistic tradition—to Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, and Picasso's "Guernica"—but beyond the shared horror, anger, and compassion for war's victims, it is again the special qualities of the Marukis' work that compel attention.

What, then, are these special qualities? Essentially, they come from two directions—subject and style—and the dynamism of the interaction can be fully appreciated only by seeing the mural art of the Marukis as an organic whole, extending from 1950 into the 1980s. The artists have painted more than twenty major murals over this period (and are still painting as this introduction is written); and while their passion has rarely flagged, their vision has constantly changed. Thematically, the murals reveal an almost relentlessly logical evolution of political and moral consciousness, and it is no exaggeration to say that they now represent the most sustained artistic endeavor of our tiplies to depict the atrocities and man-made disasters of the mid-twentieth century. The later murals go beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki to depict Auschwitz and the Japanese Rape of Nanking...The murals also move from a latent nationalism, in the form of anger and self-pity at the sufferings wreaked upon Japan and the Japanese, to a tragic vision that leaves race and country far behind to grapple with questions concerning human nature, the modern state, and, quite literally, the very meaning of hell in the modern age.

The murals of Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi cover this formidable range, moreover, in a style that is fluid and changing but always distinctive. In its most successful moments, the style derives exceptional depth and energy from the fact that the paintings are a collaborative act by two strong and stubborn individuals whose temperaments and artistic backgrounds differ greatly: one trained in traditional Japanese brush painting and the other in Western-style oils; one devoted to landscapes, flora, and fauna, and the other to the human figure; one skeptical of "realism" and directness, and the other highly rational and literal (the dichotomy here being, in each case, Iri/Toshi, husband/wife). Just as the range of themes to which the Marukis have addressed themselves is virtually unprecedented in fine art, so also is the manner in which they have wedded what at first glance might appear to be incompatible styles and attitudes. This is collaborative art of an unusually rich sort. Eventually, it will be recognized as one of the most important, disturbing, and moving artistic expressions of the twentieth century, and it is best approached in the simplest way possible: by following the unplanned, chronological manner in which the murals were conceived and painted.

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi were living in Tokyo in August 1945 when they heard that Hiroshima had been devastated. Concerned about his parents and relatives, who resided on the outskirts of the stricken city, Iri took the first available train there. Although over sixty Japanese cities had been bombed prior to Hiroshima, communications remained intact and he arrived at his destination three days after leaving the capital. His wife joined him a few days later.

Several of Iri's relatives and acquaintances were killed immediately by the atomic bomb. His father lingered for six months before dying. His mother survived. "We carried the injured," the Marukis later recalled of these weeks, "cremated the dead, searched for food, made roofs of scorched tin sheets, wandered about just like those who had experienced the bomb, in the midst of flies and maggots and the stench of death." It rained after their arrival, and the ashes of Hiroshima turned into mire that caked everyone's clothes. Sanitation was nonexistent, food had to be scavenged, and after cooking and eating half-scorched pumpkins she found in a field, Toshi became ill.

The couple returned to Tokyo in the second week of September and attempted to resume their artistic careers. Iri, born the eldest son in a poor rural family in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1901, had left the countryside at age twenty-one and apprenticed himself to artists working in "water-and-ink" (suiboku) and traditional Japanese-style painting (Nihonga). He painted the familiar "pure" themes of landscapes, flora, and fauna with strong strokes that often shaded from the representative into the abstract, and in the 1930s began to attract attention in Nihonga circles for his innovative techniques and attraction to unusually large-scale paintings. His wife, who retained her original name of Akamatsu Toshiko until 1956, was born in a Buddhist clerical family in Hokkaido in 1912, and had more formal education and art training. From 1929 to 1933, she studied Western-style painting at the Women's Art Institute (Joshi Bijutsu Senmon Gakkō) in Tokyo, emphasizing oils. In 1937, and again in 1941, Toshi served as governess and tutor to the children of Japanese officials stationed in Moscow, where she saw exhibitions of the Impressionists and encountered the works of Goya as well as contemporary artists as disparate as Käthe Kollwitz and Marc Chagall. In 1939, she lived and painted in Micronesia for half a year. The Marukis were married in 1941, he for the second time [in fact for the fourth time].

"Oil and water," Maruki Iri wrote years later, when asked to comment on the relationship between himself and Toshi. But as it turned out, in their case these were to mix in a manner unprecedented in art history.

In the 1930s, Iri was loosely associated with proletarian artists in the Hiroshima area; and as Japan moved into all-out war with China and then the Anglo-American powers, both he and Toshi were attracted to the Surrealists, whom they admired as a last bastion of antimilitarist opposition. A surrealist self-portrait by Toshi survives from this period, reflecting both defiance of authority and her personal anguish and anger. Iri was not drafted for the war in China because the right half of his face is covered by a large birthmark, which divides his countenance into light and dark sides. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was already forty and too old for conscription. Unlike most of their colleagues in both the Nihonga and Western-style schools, Iri and Toshi managed to avoid being recruited and sent abroad to produce patriotic depictions of the war effort. As a result, they were cut off from the art supplies and extra rations that the government provided to cooperative artists, and also entered the postwar period with no experience of having confronted war as a serious subject of their art. Iri continued to paint traditional subjects in the India-ink medium, including a figure—rare for him—of a crusty patriarch seated in meditation, done in 1942. Because of the shortage of supplies, Toshi worked a great deal with chalk, pencil, and paper rather than oils—a hardship which gave her, as it turned out, greater technical appreciation of chiaroscuro. There was no market for their art in wartime Japan, and in the final year of the war they were reduced to subsisting on a diet consisting mostly of potatoes.

In the wake of Japan's surrender, the Marukis joined the Communist Party. For many artists and intellectuals this was an easy decision, since the Communists were perceived as having offered the most forthright and consistent opposition to fascism and militarism ever since the Party was founded in Japan in 1922. The Marukis were by temperament undoctrinaire, however, and their concerns turned in directions not emphasized by the Communists in those immediate postwar years. It was the Party's position that the occupation force led by the United States was an army of liberation, and that Party members should focus on Japans bright future. The Communists officially supported the occupations announced goals of "demilitarization and democratization," and looked forward to a peaceful democratic revolution that at some indefinite time in the future would carry over into a socialist revolution. For various reasons, the Marukis were unable to share this optimism.

For months after Japan's Surrender, Toshi passed blood from her bowels and could hardly draw a firm line. She feared she was suffering from radiation sickness, then on top of this was found to have contracted tuberculosis, and fell into a period of deep anxiety. In 1948, she and Iri moved to an abandoned house in the hills of Kamakura, south of Tokyo, for a change of scene and tried to paint "faces bright with peace" in the spirit that then suffused much of the Japanese art world. Both worked with young male and female models, Iri for the first time in his career, but despite their best efforts an underlying grief was discernible in their portraits. Partly, this came from memories of Hiroshima. Partly, they felt their models themselves betrayed the ravages of war, for almost all had known hardships and lost loved ones. And both were concerned about Toshi's frail health.

In this setting, on a rainy evening in the hills of Kamakura in 1948, the couple decided they had to paint Hiroshima together. It is not clear who first broached the idea openly, but both were driven in this direction. In Toshi's case, as she recalled decades later, she was not sure how long she had to live, and this was to be her final testament. They resolved to paint people rather than desolation and a wasted landscape, for that was the essence of the tragedy they had witnessed. As preparation, they produced hundreds of figure sketches from models, including Iri's mother, who visited them for a while. Because the bomb stripped the clothes from most victims, they posed their figures nude. Sometimes they used each other as models, or painted their own mirrored reflections.

Of necessity, they worked in solitude, for the atomic bomb was still a forbidden subject in occupied Japan. Photographs and film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been confiscated by U.S. authorities, and journalistic accounts or reminiscences were banned. This policy had been adopted on the grounds that such publicity could provoke anti-Americanism among the Japanese and disrupt the orderly progress of the occupation. To Iri, the fact that the Japanese people had no graphic impressions at all of the human consequences of the atomic bombs—no personal accounts, no visual images, not even a basic vocabulary—was the most compelling reason for attempting to paint this taboo subject.

The decision to paint Hiroshima also was taken independently of the Communist Party, which in 1948 still adhered to a pro-American policy and was not particularly interested in nuclear issues. When the first Maruki mural was completed in February 1950 and exhibited shortly thereafter, it thus represented an unprecedented and intensely personal expression of the atomic-bomb experience. For most Japanese, this was the first time they had ever been confronted with the reality of Hiroshima, and the outbreak of the Korean War several months later undoubtedly intensified the impact of this vision. Virtually banished from popular consciousness for over four years, Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear devastation suddenly became an issue of immediate and compelling concern in Japan. American occupation authorities did not interfere with the exhibition of the first or later collaborative murals, although they did suppress a popular collection of black-and-white illustrations of Hiroshima by the Marukis which was published on August 6, 1950. The booklet, titled Pika-don and subsequently well known in Japan, included hell scenes that would soon take their place as unforgettable icons in the Japanese re-creation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: swallows with their wings burned off, severed legs still standing upright, dead soldiers turned into recognizable statues of ash.

When the Marukis decided to wed their talents and emotional resources and paint Hiroshima, they had in mind only a single composition, the "procession of ghosts" that now stands as the first of their long-series of murals. Like the mushroom cloud and radioactive black rain, the procession of ghosts belongs uniquely to the atomic-bomb experience. People who were outside when the bomb was dropped commonly threw their hands over their faces when the blinding flash of the explosion occurred, seconds before the blast struck them. As a consequence, many survivors, stripped of their clothes and often disfigured, suffered excruciating burns on their arms and hands. In the plain vocabulary of the disaster, the skin peeled off "like cloth," or "like a glove." To ease the pain, the victims instinctively extended their arms in front of them, hands dangling at the wrists—almost exactly as ghosts and ghouls and the living dead do in the traditional iconography of Japan as well as the West.

The streets of Hiroshima, and three days later Nagasaki, became peopled with mute lines of such figures, and they continued to be seen many days after the bombs were dropped. In those later days, Toshi recalled, some of the ghostly figures were red, having been painted with mercurochrome. Others were white, for when the mercurochrome ran out, in some places all that was left to treat the burns was boric acid. It was this scene that Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri had in mind as they sketched and painted in Kamakura from 1948 to early 1950. Indeed, after Toshi resolved that she must paint what they had seen, it was the procession of ghosts that passed most vividly before her mind's eye. Lying in bed one evening, she rose and stripped and stood before a mirror, arms outstretched, seeing not herself but a pregnant woman, and trying to imagine if any artist could recapture this.

The original title of the mural now known as "Ghosts" was simply "Atomic Bomb," which in turn was soon changed to 'August 6" to lessen the chances of censorship. Painted in sumi on paper and mounted in the format of an eight-panel screen (1.8 by 7.2 meters), this was first exhibited in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. It provoked divergent responses, and an exchange among viewers at this premiére changed the course of the Marukis' lives. When one observer criticized the nakedness of the figures as unrealistic and another dismissed the work as excessively propagandistic, an elderly man rebuked them in a loud voice that attracted attention. Identifying himself as a resident of Hiroshima who had lost his daughter and grandson on August 6, he declared that the mural was by no means an exaggeration. He could almost see his grandson in the scene, and what was truly regrettable was that the artists had stopped after painting only this. Turning to Toshi, who was standing nearby, the man urged her to go on painting. "These," he exclaimed, "are our paintings."

This was the genesis of one of the most ambitious artistic undertakings of this century. The Marukis returned from the Tokyo exhibition to complete two more powerful murals on the Hiroshima theme in 1950, "Fire" and "Water." The former, intimating hell, gave a hint of the unanticipated resources that the two artists had to draw upon; for not only did their seemingly divergent styles merge effectively, but it also became apparent that many of the painterly idioms of traditional Japanese art could be applied with stunning effects to stark contemporary subjects. Thus, the brilliantly stylized flames that consume the victims of Hiroshima in "Fire" can also be seen in ancient Buddhist paintings and medieval Japanese scrolls, including classic depictions of the torments of jigoku, or hell.

In "Water," the transformation of familiar forms occurred in different ways. Water itself, the great symbol of life, became a medium of death for many residents of Hiroshima who fled to the rivers to escape the flames, only to succumb there or be swept away. And near the center of this third mural, in what is now perhaps the most famous single detail in all of the Marukis' joint work, stands a Madonnaesque woman cradling an infant in her arms and discovering that the infant has died. In this new world, as the Marukis phrased it, even the mother-and-child has become an image of despair. The Marukis themselves are childless, and Toshi's personal identification with motherhood and children is perhaps all the more insistent and explicit because of this. As time passed, Toshi established herself in her independent career as one of Japans most popular illustrators of children's books, where her style is distinguished by its soft lines and warm colors. At the same time, in the decades that followed the three pioneer panels of 1950, mothers, pregnant women, youngsters, and infants remained at the very center of the vision of nuclear hell she painted with Iri.

Iri was ready to call "Water" the end of the project, but it was not to be. They went on to complete two more murals in 1951. In "Rainbow," where corpses hang from trees like carcasses in a slaughterhouse, the Marukis introduced a theme they would return to in a very different manner two decades later. Two handcuffed American prisoners of war lie among the figures depicted here, shot down during an earlier air raid over Japan and now themselves victims of the bomb. In the right-hand quarter of this fourth mural, a double rainbow arches over wounded horses—a touch of hope, Toshi recalled, which they introduced to try to come out of their own despair. In the second mural completed that year, titled "Boys and Girls," the gnarled trees that so often are objects of admiration and symbols of longevity in Oriental art have become the debris of a blasted landscape, their twisted forms echoed by the broken bodies of schoolchildren lying alongside them.

In the hours and days that followed the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many victims continued to grasp some object that had been close by when the blast occurred, such as a pair of chopsticks. Psychologically, we may say they were attempting to hold on to a world that appeared to have been completely destroyed. The most ordinary things suddenly became rare and precious. This instinctive response was transformed into an enduring symbol in the artists' sixth mural, titled "Atomic Desert" and completed in 1952, where the dominant figure in a seemingly boundless wasteland, a naked mother searching for her child, clutches a rag doll in her hand. Strewn about her are great piles of human and animal bones, including the skulls of cattle, and here again we have an example of the unanticipated world into which Hiroshima drew the artists. From an early date, cows and oxen had been among Iri's favorite subjects as a Nihonga painter, while Toshi had always specialized in the human form. In "Atomic Desert," these admired subjects were literally stripped to dead bone, while the empty spaces so characteristic of classical Oriental painting became transformed from realms of mystery into zones of desolate emptiness.

...in 1955, the Marukis themselves moved away from the Hiroshima theme to deal with contemporary nuclear issues. "Yaizu" (the name of a fishing town) was their response to the widely publicized irradiation of a Japanese fishing boat during an American hydrogen-bomb test in the Pacific. In "Petition," also completed in 1955, they celebrated the successful movement initiated by housewives in Tokyo to collect signatures against atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. In this peaceful scene appear blossoms of the cherry and plum, traditional—and fragile—harbingers of spring after the long death of winter...

Eleven collaborative paintings were thus completed in a decade, all of a size corresponding to an eight-panel screen. They became known collectively as the Genbaku no Zu, or “Atomic-Bomb Paintings (1). Eventually the Marukis also began to place short explanations by the murals. Iri opposed this on the grounds that art must speak for itself, but eventually resigned himself to Toshi’s argument that words can read places paintings alone cannot reach (2)… In 1964, they were expelled from the Communist Party along with a dozen or so others for refusing to draw a distinction between capitalist nuclear weapons and socialist ones. In 1967, the murals received a permanent home with the opening of the Maruki Gallery (Maruki Bijustukan) by the artists’ residence in Saitama Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo.

Beginning in the 1950s, the murals began to be exhibited throughout the world, remounted as hanging scrolls (eight per painting) rather than folding screens. Invitations continued over the decades that followed, and by the end of the 1970s the paintings had been shown in roughly thirty countries on both sides of the cold war. Several of the murals toured Eastern and Western Europe in 1953, and in 1956 the first ten paintings were sent on a world tour that included the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, North Korea, West Germany and other parts of Western Europe, South Africa, and eventually Australia and New Zealand. The first eight murals were brought on a tour of eight cities in the United States in 1970-71, and met an extremely mixed critical reception. One critic denounced them as "perfectly dreadful" and "a degradation of all that Hiroshima should demand of us," while another ascribed to them an aesthetic brilliance "as vivid as Goya's scenes of war and perhaps even more emotionally charged than Picasso's 'Guernica.'"

...When Buddhism and indigenous folk worship came together in ancient Japan, there emerged a belief that the souls of the dead returned to earth for a few days each year. The occasion, known as Bon, was carried on into modern times in the rural areas, where the dead were welcomed back with offerings and dances. On the final day of the Bon observances, paper lanterns placed on pieces of wood, with lighted candles in them, were floated down the local rivers at dusk. The names of the deceased were often written on the lanterns, and as the lights moved away into the darkness they created a serene impression of the souls of the dead returning to the other world. In most parts of Japan, Bon is observed in mid-August. Thus, the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly coincide with this old folk practice, and after the occupation of Japan ended in 1952 it became common to float lanterns on August 6 in remembrance of the bomb victims and as a prayer for peace. Because the rivers of Hiroshima became clogged with bodies in 1945, the floating lanterns actually take on a double meaning: they symbolize the dead not only in the gentle manner of Bon, but also as graphic replicas of the victims that were swept down the seven big rivers of Hiroshima and into the Inland Sea. "Floating Lanterns," the twelfth mural, captured this many-layered observance, mingling images of life and death, the traditional and contemporary, the representative and abstract. Portions of the screen seem almost Cubist in their style of abstraction, although anyone who has seen this commemorative observance knows that the lanterns actually do bunch up on the rivers in such elegant geometric patterns.

In the Marukis' painting, as in the ritual observance itself, the floating lanterns offer a nearly perfect counterpoise of beauty and creativity set against war and brutalization. Aesthetically and spiritually, the atomic-bomb experience is transcended. At the same time, however, the lantern ceremony is peculiarly Japanese, and, as such, suggests some of the nationalistic overtones which can become interwoven with the remembrance of August 1945 in Japan. The commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, can also become a conservative occasion for self-pity, reinforcing the belief that the Japanese nation and race are long-suffering and more sinned against than sinning. When this happens, remembrance also entails forgetfulness. Pre-occupation with the horror to which the Japanese were subjected at the end of the war is accompanied by neglect of the suffering the Japanese have caused others—and, indeed, have inflicted on each other over the centuries. The Marukis themselves were not immune to such introversion, and it was the emergence of a more complex perception of victim and victimizer that distinguished their collaborative work after 1969. In "Floating Lanterns," they pointed to a new world of stylistic innovation. The next year, when they visited the United States for the first time in conjunction with the exhibition of the first eight Hiroshima murals, they began to see that the bombs were but one manifestation of a forbidding world.

There appear to have been three especially influential occurrences in the United States that, like the conversation overheard at the exhibition of the first mural in 1950, changed the artists' lives. Impressed by the warmth of those who helped arrange their U.S. tour and by the commitment of many Americans to the peace movement, the Marukis acknowledged the hate they had felt against the Americans for Hiroshima, and the inconsistency of this with their professions of peace. As Toshi later put it, in 1970 they finally went beyond racial consciousness. In addition, and more concretely, in New York Toshi was confronted by an American woman who had lost her son at Pearl Harbor and asked if Hiroshima were not the logical outcome of Japan's own aggression. Acknowledging the enormity of the Japanese attack, Toshi went on to tell of a news report that had recently appeared in the Japanese press concerning over twenty American prisoners of war killed by the bomb in Hiroshima. The atomic bomb, she suggested, was indiscriminate. The exchange brought the two women together. They held hands, and as they did so Toshi resolved that she and Iri would paint the death of the American POWs next—although she was as yet unaware that this project would carry them into undreamed-of discoveries concerning the actual fate of the Americans in Hiroshima. In yet another exchange, one of the hosts for the exhibition of the murals in Pasadena asked the Marukis how they would feel if Chinese artists came to Japan to show paintings of the Rape of Nanking and other wartime Japanese atrocities. With this simple question, Hiroshima became more clearly placed, in their eyes, among the atrocities of the mid-twentieth century that transcended nation or nationality, pointing not merely to the nature of war, but to the darkness at the heart of humankind itself that had merely been compounded by modern technology.

Site Ed. note: The mural, “American POWs,” was completed in 1971; “Crows” (depicting Korean victims of the bomb) in 1972, “Rape of Nanking,” in 1975; and “Auschwitz” (their largest mural) in 1977. In another large mural, 1979, “From the Axis Pact to Sanrizuka”—the last a reference to the site where farmers had attempted to protect their land from dispossession by the Japanese government for a new airport—the Marukis were so bold as to depict the still living Emperor Hirohito behind bars along with Hitler and Mussolini. According to Dower, they subsequently donated this mural to the Bulgaria’s National Art Gallery, following an exhibit of anti-fascist art in Sophia.

[In 1982 Iri] and Toshi returned to the atomic-bomb theme with a mural titled "Nagasaki." In the history of late feudal Japan, Nagasaki was distinguished as the city where Christianity first took roots in the mid-sixteenth century. The Christian presence carried over into World War II, and the bomb that fell on August 9 devastated Urakami Cathedral, collapsing the roof, blasting out the rose window, detaching the head of Mary, and blackening statues of the saints. In the Nagasaki mural, a crucified Christ was turned upside down, the cathedral was consumed by flames, and the hell fires introduced two decades earlier in a Buddhist aura now enveloped Christian icons and Japanese clasping rosaries in -their hands. In 1983, and again in 1984, the Marukis turned to the last great battle of World War 11, and the death of thousands of Okinawan men, women, and children who were killed or persuaded to commit suicide by the doomed Japanese army. In 1985, they returned to Nagasaki to paint a mural titled simply "Hell." They had been painting hell on earth since 1950, they said, and it now seemed appropriate to address the subject directly. Like so much of their collaborative work, "Hell" drew inspiration from many sources, traditional as well as contemporary-including a fourteenth-century fresco by Giotto and the insatiable demons (gaki) familiar to all Japanese through the grim twelfth-century "Scroll of the Hungry Ghosts" (Gaki Zöshi). For the second time, the artists included the emperor of Japan in their painting; and for the second time, they included themselves as well. Hell was now and hereafter, and both the oppressors of others and those who were too weak to prevent oppression were doomed to suffer its eternal torments.

Since the first exhibition in 1950, the collaborative art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki has received wide attention in Japan. To be sure, it has its detractors. The Japanese Communist Party, after expelling the Marukis in 1964, has found little to admire in their work, while the government has concluded that the atomic-bomb murals are inappropriate for children to see. In 1981, the Ministry of Education refused to certify a textbook which reproduced the two central panels of "Relief," declaring the scene to be "too cruel" for young people—a euphemism, as critics saw it, for being too politically sensitive. No large donations were received from public, corporate, or political sources when the Maruki Gallery was built in 1967. On the other hand, there were many small private contributions. Each new mural receives serious attention in the media when it is first exhibited, and the paintings have been reproduced in numerous publications. Approximately fifty thousand people visit the Maruki Gallery in Saitama Prefecture each year, including many schoolchildren brought there on class excursions. By the early 1980s, millions of people in Japan and abroad had seen at least some of the murals in person.

The originality and boldness of the Marukis' work is obvious, but it is still difficult to explain why it is able to reach and appeal to so many people. When the artists were in Poland, trying to comprehend Auschwitz, someone urged them not to paint death but “happy pictures” instead. And, indeed, they have done so in their individual work. The power of the murals does not lie simply in the harsh nature of the subjects however, but rather in the fact that these too have been painted with compassion and a sense of beauty. Toshi expressed this as follows, when she and Iri were working on the Okinawa mural: “People are still human, no matter how brutalized they may be. We do paint dark, cruel, painful scenes. But the question is, how should we portray the people who face such realities? We want to paint them beautifully.” It is helpful to direct this comment back over the murals that Toshi and Iri painted during the course of more than three decades. For it becomes clear that the victims they portray are indeed beautiful to them--and, in the end, to most of us. This is where much of the power of the paintings lies. It is the source of the sense of tragedy. In itself, however, this is only a partial explanation, for it neglects the dynamism of the collaborative act and the potent role of art in historical memory.

When the Marukis decided to paint Hiroshima together in 1948, they had no model for either what to paint or how to collaborate. It was clear only that Toshi, by virtue of her training, would be responsible for most of the figures. In style and by temperament, the two artists were very different; and as the work progressed, it became clear that their philosophies of art differed greatly as well. The act of collaboration was by no means always harmonious, nor was it always successful. Iri, for example, fundamentally despised realism, popularization, and the very idea of collaboration—no small obstacles to cooperating in producing works for a general audience! He had great respect for the tradition of "pure" painting, and great fondness for the abstractness found in both Nihonga and Surrealism. Directness bored him, and compromise ran counter to his nature. He painted when the mood struck him, completing large works in a matter of minutes, and freely acknowledged that most of the ideas for new murals came from Toshi. Iri's notion of the essence of worldly wisdom was encapsuled in a rather onomatopoetic phrase he was especially fond of: ruru, to flow, to move as the spirit moves one. By contrast, Toshi characterized herself as a fireball (hi no tama). On several occasions, Iri declared, in all apparent seriousness, that if by chance Toshi died before him, he intended to make a bonfire by the river of their entire body of collaborative work.

Yet Iri also acknowledged that what they did together could not have been accomplished by one artist alone. He and Toshi were really rivals rather than partners, he said—and Toshi agreed—and in innumerable ways their rivalry contributed to heightened creativity...When actually painting the final version of a mural, the great sheets of paper laid flat on the studio floor, they tended to work in silence, each going over what the other had done, back and forth, in what in the end can only be described as a virtually unprecedented act of pure artistic collaboration. . . .

What finally sets the Marukis' work apart, of course, is the subject matter itself. They have assumed the task of creating a graphic chronicle of war and destruction in the mid-twentieth century; and by doing so, they have without question shaped the way many Japanese, and non-Japanese as well, will remember these decades. This is no small task, for historical memory is fickle and the influence of powerful visual images is incalculable. Much of what the Marukis have painted might well be nearly forgotten already if they had not given us such strong images to hold on to: icons of the human suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; testimonials to the fate of American and Korean victims; re-creations of the Rape of Nanking, and the rape of Minamata as well; and a reminder of Okinawa, where Japanese soldiers killed their own countrymen and women before killing themselves. When the images are offered with a sense of tragedy and complexity as well as anger, as Iri and Toshi Maruki have done, the historic memory has been well served.

Site Ed. note: In this essay, Dower is not distinguishing between the immediate deaths, August 6 and 9, from blast, heat, and radiation and the continuing deaths from radiation in the days, weeks, and years following the two blasts. He goes on to estimate that “immediate or early” deaths of Korean victims of the bomb numbered 5000 to 8000 in Hiroshima and 1500 to 2000 in Nagasaki. Other victims included over 1000 Japanese Americans (Nisei, or second generation) in Hiroshima, several hundreds from Taiwan and China, 2 Malaysians in Hiroshima, “several” Germans and White Russians in Nagasaki; and possibly some British, Australian, Dutch, and Indonesian prisoners of war as well as 20-23 American prisoners, some of whom died from the blast and others at the hands of embittered Japanese.

From: Dower, John W. “War, Peace, and Beauty: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki.” The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki. Eds. John W. Dower and John Junkerman. Tokyo, New York: Kodansha International, 1985, 9-26.