SURVIVORS
SURVIVORS UNFORGETTABLE FIRE edited by Japan Broadcasting Company Pantheon Books. 110 pp. $15.95 hardcover. $7.95 paperback. n May 1974, Iwakichi Kobayashi, an old man of seventy-seven, brought...
...Before my death I wanted to draw it and leave it for others...
...the story behind the collection of these pictures is told in an afterword, and the pictures are accompanied by captions written by their creators...
...that 4.4 square miles of the city were completely destroyed...
...The reason is that Unforgettable Fire simultaneously asks and answers, with the directness that only individual experience can have, a great philosophical question: "What can be worth preserving in a species that spawned Hiroshima and still ignores its lessons...
...These pictures leave no doubt that those who survived were seared indelibly by the events, in mind if not in body...
...In the statistical vision of atomic war, which is the most that many of us ever contemplate, we learn that as a result of a single blast, 80,000 to 100,000 people were killed at Hiroshima and an equal number wounded...
...This book, which draws on the resources of art, and embodies the terrible testament of individual souls, restores some sense of the concrete reality of atomic war...
...The drawings in this book are primitive, for none was made by a professional artist...
...Lawrence University in New York and a visiting fellow in philosophy at Princeton...
...Often the latter are translations of text which appears in Japanese on the pictures themselves...
...Baylor L. Johnson (Baylor L. Johnson is associate professor of philosophy at St...
...Almost 1,000 were received in the next two months, and Unforgettable Fire contains 104 of them in color...
...More importantly we should all own the vision which it embodies, and act with the knowledge which it demands...
...Even now I cannot erase the scene from my memory," he told those to whom he brought his work...
...Often this power is enhanced by the nature of the work, reminding us simultaneously that simple, innocent people were the victims of this abomination, and how they have struggled to make tKeir passionate appeal to the world...
...Most are crude...
...We should all own Unforgettable Fire...
...n May 1974, Iwakichi Kobayashi, an old man of seventy-seven, brought to the studios of Japan Broadcasting Company (NHK) in Hiroshima a drawing which recorded something of his experience as a survivor of the atomic inferno at Hiroshima, August 6, 1945...
...These numbers are beyond our comprehension and produce in us only the numbness that infects and shames our civilization...
...that bombs have since been tested which have more than 2,800 times the explosive force of the "toy" used on Hiroshima, and that today the United States and the Soviet Union have managed to deploy weapons whose total destructive force is more than 550,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb...
...All are powerful...
...Why should anyone buy such a book, entailing, as the purchase does, the contemplation of something so horrible and terrifying...
...Together with its drawings, Unforgettable Fire contains a brief narrative account of the bombing of Hiroshima and of a still unsuccessful attempt to ban nuclear weapons which was founded there...
...Stunned by the power of the picture— not by its aesthetic merit, but by the inescapable force of a memory revealed directly—NHK Hiroshima broadcast an appeal for other pictures by survivors...
...The answer lies in the acts of courage and kindness amidst incomprehensible suffering which are narrated here, and in the fact that humans could create beauty—for some of the pictures are beautiful despite their subject—even from this horror...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
