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• 1 2020-05-26T15:13:48+00:00 Peace Issue 2 plain 2020-06-14T15:24:41+00:00 Shikoku Gorō’s cover illustration of the August 6 1950 edition of Our Poems draws on the dramatic imagery employed by the Marukis in Atom Bomb Panel paintings and Picasso’s Guernica. The iconic mother and child in the center are surrounded by faces, torsos, and hands in various poses of pain, sadness, need, and agony. The following year, Shikoku would employ similar visual vocabulary such as nude figures (associated with the atom bombing) and disconnected body parts on a flat plane for expressing vulnerability and the disruptive violence of war in the book Atom Bomb Poems. This “Peace” issue is the first to feature multiple poems that name the atom bomb and an explanation of the antinuclear petition Stockholm Appeal. The article on the “Korean Problem” focuses on President Truman’s alarming statement that nuclear weapons might be used on the Korean Peninsula, as well as critique of the economic and military ramifications of Japan’s role in the Korean War and the Cold War.
  Long before the advent of television and the internet, journals and books were the primary means of circulating ideas, information, and images in the mid-20th century. The Our Poems culture circle employed such paper-based print media--rather than the rarified space of museums--as part of its goal to circulate its art and social critique widely.