Anguish in Human Form

Maruki Gallery keeps alive the memory of the world’s first nuclear attack.

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In Japan, plans to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were complicated by the closure, in April, of the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In the decades that followed, the museum has served as a base for peace education and community activism.

The gallery, in the countryside near Tokyo, houses the monumental atomic bomb paintings of the husband-and-wife collaborators Iri and Toshi Maruki. The closure threatened the very survival of the museum, a private institution that relies on admission fees and small donations to cover its operating costs.  

But extensive coverage by Japanese media brought a deluge of online contributions—more than fifty million yen (about $500,000) from 5,000 supporters in just a few weeks.

These donations put the museum back on solid footing for the coming year and allowed it to reopen in early June. The gallery will mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing on August 6 with a scaled-down commemoration, and is well positioned to fulfill its mission of passing on the memory of this horrific event to future generations.

The paintings that came to be known as The Hiroshima Panels (Genbaku no zu) were created to prevent the memory of the atomic bomb from falling into oblivion. The Marukis had spent a month in Hiroshima, at Iri’s family home, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, and were haunted by the scenes they witnessed.

But under the American-led occupation of Japan, which continued until 1952, all accounts and photographs of the atomic-bomb attacks were banned. In defiance of this censorship, the Marukis painted Ghosts, a life-size depiction of injured and traumatized hibakusha (or bomb survivors), which was first exhibited in 1950.

The painting restored the human form and anguish of those who had vanished in the ashes. Intense public response to the first exhibitions of Ghosts led the Marukis to continue their work, and ten of the fifteen Hiroshima Panels were completed by 1955. These were widely exhibited in Japan and toured the world for a decade before returning to their permanent home, the Maruki Gallery, which opened in 1967.

In the decades that followed, the museum has served as a base for peace education and community activism. Additional halls were added to house ever- more monumental collaborative murals, including The Rape of Nanking (1975), The Battle of Okinawa (1984), and the fifty-two-foot-wide Auschwitz (1977).

When Iri died in 1995—fifty years after the end of the war—followed by Toshi in 2000, there was concern over whether the gallery would survive without the artists’ charismatic presence. In 2001, the museum hired its first trained curator, Yukinori Okamura, then in his mid-twenties. He has been there ever since.

In addition to his scholarly research on the Marukis’ art and the history of exhibition of the Hiroshima Panels, Okamura has curated a steady stream of special exhibitions of younger artists. In the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the museum has become a venue of choice for the kind of socially engaged art that public institutions in Japan are often reluctant to exhibit.

The gallery recently unveiled a long overdue redesign of its website, as well as a robust English site, both designed by a third-generation Hiroshima survivor.

Web-savvy young supporters managed the online coronavirus closure fund, and bilingual volunteers have mounted an international crowd-funding campaign to produce a virtual tour of the museum. It will be directed by Takashi Arai, an innovative photographer who employs daguerreotypes to explore nuclear themes; his Fukushima photographs were exhibited at the museum in 2012.

Okamura launched a $3 million fund drive to remodel the museum with temperature and humidity controls to preserve the Marukis’ paintings, which have begun to deteriorate and suffer insect damage. One third of this goal has been raised so far. When we spoke recently, he stressed his sense of obligation to the future.

“Since Fukushima, and now with the pandemic, reality seems to be increasingly invisible to the eye,” Okamura told me. “We want to ensure that, after the virus is contained, there will still be a Maruki Gallery in this world, where you can come to learn how to visualize those things that cannot be seen.”