Shikoku Gorō’s Angry Jizo Illustrations
Out of this experience of the bombing and decades of activism and advocacy, Yamaguchi worked with Shikoku and Numata to make Angry Jizo accessible broadly. The pages before this illustration of the bomb blast show scenes of Hiroshima in wartime before air war has affected the city. In this spread, Shikoku uses smeared watercolors in black and purple to suggest the force of the blast. He leaves the source of the energy release white, to evoke the blinding flash (pika) that so many survivors reported seeing. In the book, the text is in the upper left of the spread.
On the pages immediately following the bomb blast, Shikoku revisits an image he had used in Atom Bomb Poetry cover: Lines of injured people, their clothes blown or burnt off, flee from the fires. In contrast to the following pages (not shown here), Shikoku softens the images so viewers cannot see their burns and wounds, and shows the living, rather than charred corpses.
Again, Shikoku recalls the inside cover of Atom Bomb Poetry with the iconic figure of the injured girl, moments before she collapses before the Jizo.
The Jizo has stopped smiling, and instead glares out like a fierce Deva king. He responds to the girl’s pleas for water by shedding tears into her mouth. In the several close ups of the girls face as she fades away, Shikoku avoids showing any injury to her face. On the next page, the girl looks up and smiles at Jizo before the color drains from her face. With that, the Jizo shakes and his head breaks into a million pieces, mixing with the soil and sand that are now home to the hundred thousands of dead and the city—pulverized and incinerated by the nuclear weapons.