Popular Protest in Post War Japan: The Antiwar Art of Shikoku Gorō

Text, Image, and the War Dead

Shikoku carefully paired text and image in  this book. Some of the text concerns the beauty of his beloved Hiroshima, but most passages narrate the entanglement of the built and natural environments with broader imperial and national histories and memories, as well as local and personal meanings. Shikoku revisited certain sites over a period of decades to sketch; other times he drew from memory. He explained drawing cityscapes as a process of grappling with the larger evolving meanings of Hiroshima as it oscillates between hometown, community, military center, city of peace, and contested global site in the nuclear age. At the same time, the book celebrate the richness of daily life there. 

The book evokes Hiroshima as a beautiful city built on top of the bones of the war dead; a place once destroyed by a nuclear bomb but now alive with lush green trees, mountains, and a thriving built environment; a delta with a hundred bridges spanning the rivers so one might go home. The book also asserts an ethical stance against nuclear weapons, social injustice, and war, one consonant with the spirit of Hiroshima (Hiroshima no kokoro).

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