WORKS

August 8 th, 1945 . Two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a statement made by Dr Harold Jacobson, a scientist involved in the Manhattan Project, was published in an article by the Washington Post. Jacobson claimed that nothing would grow on the atomic- bombed land of Hiroshima for 75 years. Shortly after this, the scientist retracted the statement. Yet at the end of the same month, various Japanese newspapers reported the theory that Hiroshima would remain barren for 70 to 75 years.

August 9 th, 1945 . The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki took millions of lives in an instant, reducing the city to a vast land of ruins. The people, amidst fears of radiation exposure and devastation over the barren land, mourned for the dead. And without stopping, they continued with life. On the land of ruins, the people restored their city.

Today, 800 meters from the hypocenter, the atomic-bombed camphor trees of the Sanno Shrine remain. Scorched by the heat rays, the trees were considered dead after the bombing, but in October of the same year, new sprouts appeared at the back of the trees.

When Japan placed a ban on Christianity in 1614 , lives were sacrificed in the form of martyrdom, and the Christian people were forced to continue their faith in secret for 230 years before finally regaining the freedom to follow their beliefs. The Urakami Cathedral, known for its twin bell towers and located 500 meters from the hypocenter, was built by the Christians brick by brick, taking thirty years to complete. Just twenty years later, in the August 9 th bombing, the cathedral was destroyed in a single nuclear blast. After appeals for preserving the destructed area were dismissed, in 1958 , the cathedral’s ruins were cleared, and reconstruction began. Some of its remnants are preserved in the city today.

Scenery is an expression of time and space.
Latent past events. Traces of action. Overlapping memories.
The effect of a scenery changes depending on where the viewer stands. Photography, too, is the same. Through repeated recording and recalling, our memories become flattened, and at times, certain memories are emphasized. Like an afterimage created by a flash of light, these memories are captured by that ground. When responding to this through scenery, we understand it by relating what we see to our own experiences and memories.
The atomic-bombed ground, which lies beneath the earth, is the land on which someone once lived their precious life. To confront a scenery is to look at the past through the present, and at times, to come face to face with lost lives.

Tomoko Sasaki