Seeing the Blast through Imperial Eyes: Ethnoracial Dimensions and Aesthetics of Disposability in the Marukis’ Nuclear Panels

Eyewitnesses to the atomic aftermath in Hiroshima, Maruki Toshi (1912-2000) and her husband Maruki Iri (1901-1995) began creating their first Nuclear Panel (“August Sixth,” later called “Ghosts”) in 1948, exhibiting it in 1949. Both the act of creation and that of exhibition defied Occupation-era restrictions on the depiction of the human atomic dead. The couple continued creating additional panels for the next half century, touring them across Japan and, eventually, around the world. They were nominated in 1995 for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Lauded as aesthetically stunning and politically fierce works of anti-nuclear art, the Nuclear Panels also embody weighty colonial freight. My talk traces three lines of evidence to support this heterodox assertion. First, I document persistent newspaper rhetoric, from the months following the bombing, of the victims’ “burnt-black skin,” accounts which activated metaphors that often compared atomic injuries to the skin tones of inhabitants of Japan’s erstwhile colonies in Micronesia. Second, I examine Toshi’s attempts in a variety of media to depict Micronesians, whom she first sketched during a trip to the Japanese Mandate in the late 1930s. Finally, I compare Toshi and Iri’s works with other attempts, in the immediate post-war, to render the blast victims’ injured bodies. I argue that at least part of the Marukis’ success in their Nuclear works rides on the back of Toshi’s success in her Micronesian art. Reckoning with the ‘hidden in plain sight’ elements of imperial ethnoracialized vision, I suggest, reveals abiding tensions in postwar visual languages of irradiation.