Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Remembering 80 Years Later

Eighty years have passed since the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned to fire. In just moments, lives were erased, families were shattered, and two cities were changed forever. The bombs fell on August 6 and 9, 1945, killing more than 100,000 people instantly, with many more lost to the lingering effects of radiation and injury. The cities burned for days. Within the week, Japan surrendered, and the war was over, but the grief and the memory would never fade.

In an article for Densho, Nina Wallace writes: “In a cruel and often unacknowledged twist of irony, among the nearly half a million atomic bomb victims and survivors were thousands of Japanese American citizens of the United States.”

Historians estimate that around 11,000 people born in Hawaii or in the United States were in Hiroshima alone when the bomb fell. Before the war, more immigrants to the U.S. had come from Hiroshima than any other prefecture, with Nagasaki also sending many. It was common for Issei, the first generation of Japanese immigrants, to send their U.S.-born children—known as Kibei—to Japan to visit relatives and receive a Japanese education. When war broke out in 1941, many of them were stranded there. Thousands of Nisei and Kibei children found themselves in their parents’ hometowns when they were bombed by the country of their birth.

Shinkichi Tajiri’s father, Ryukichi Tajiri, was born in 1877 in Saga on Kyushu, one of Japan’s southern islands, and came from a samurai family. Shortly before his birth, the daimyo and samurai era had come to a definitive end, yet Ryukichi was still raised with the values of bushidō and the samurai code of honor. Realizing there was no future for his social class in Japan, he emigrated to the United States in 1906.

A large part of his family remained in Nagasaki. They were killed when the bomb fell. This loss left a deep mark on Shinkichi. He did not only lose family; he also faced the painful reality that his birth country had inflicted such destruction on the land of his ancestors. The destruction and horror of the atomic bombings became a painful and direct inspiration for several of his works.

Shinkichi Tajiri working on Nagasaki, 1957, Photo by Leonard Freed

Nagasaki, 1957, Bronze

Shinkichi Tajiri, working on Nagasaki, 1957. Photo by Leonard Freed

One of these was Nagasaki (1957), part of his Drippings series, which consisted of bronze assemblages created from fragmented remnants. It is one of the very few human figures among his sculptures, and it confronts the viewer with the image of a body consumed by nuclear war. As a child, Nagasaki stood in the hallway of our home. I saw it every day. Even before I fully understood its meaning, I felt its weight.

Decades later, in 1992, Shinkichi began experimenting with computer drawings on a Commodore Amiga. Once again, he returned to the memory of the catastrophic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nagasaki, august 9 1945 (Computer Drawing on Velours), 1992

Nagasaki, august 9 1945 (Computer Drawing on Velours), 1992

Nagasaki, august 9 1945 (Computer Drawing on Velours), 1992

Shinkichi Tajiri, Nagasaki, august 9 1945 (Computer Drawing printed on Velours), 1992