A bit late with this post, but in some ways it is timeless.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Little explanation is needed of the cities, their whereabouts, or their history, and what happened to them in 1945.

In this the week of the 65th year anniversary of the nuclear bombings, I decided to take a look back over old and recent assignments I’ve undertaken covering the fate of those cities and the ‘hibakusha’, or nuclear bomb survivors/victims, that I’ve met and photographed. I’ve put together a small gallery set of assignment photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki cities, and the hibakusha I met. And included below, as much as I can, are some links to some of the stories by the journalists I worked with.

In July 2005, for the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing, I travelled to Hiroshima for the Sunday Herald newspaper, with friend and journalist Torcuil Crichton (read his Hiroshima article here). Torcuil didn’t know Japan, and I didn’t know Hiroshima, but we went. We interviewed many people, explored the historical sites. Our first evening there, famished, we ate bread from a convenience store to take the edge of our hunger and then had sushi for dinner. Afterwards we stood on the bridge overlooking the Atomic Dome, and listened to the distant sound of a trumpet being played. We decided to track down the source of the music, we wandered over the bridge, down to the riverside near the Dome, and there we found Yoshitaka Shimizu. We listened, and I photographed as he played, then in a break, we spoke to him. He told us he came to the Dome to play his music for his dead grandmother to hear. His grandmother had survived the atomic bombing but died three years previously of spinal cancer. He told us his hero was Clifford Brown, the Blue Note trumpeter. The moment, and the images, seemed in journalistic fashion the perfect intro to the story we were to write and cover. Days later at the end of a great week of work together Torcuil was to ready return to Scotland, and as a parting gift he gave me a copy of Clifford Brown‘s seminal album ‘Memorial’. To this day I play it, and think of that assignment week, of Torcuil and of the trumpeter playing beside the Dome.

Another person that Torcuil Chricton and I interviewed was the charismatic Sunao Tsuboi, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing (read his story via Torcuil’s link above). Heavily scarred by the bombing, but his enthusiasm for telling his story hadn’t waned. Tsuboi took us to Miyuki Bridge. There he showed us a large black and white photograph, one of only 5 surviving images taken by Japanese photographer Yoshito Matsushige in the immediate aftermath of the 1945 Hiroshima bombing. In the image, now a permanent fixture on the bridge , sits Sunao Tusboi. Thinking this was where he would die he etched into the stone “Tsuboi died here”. Sixty years later we stood there with him, as he explained the story and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ for us.

On a different assignment I travlled with David McNeill, to Hiroshima once again, to interview Yasuhiko Shigemoto. Shigemoto-san as a young boy was 2.5km from the blast centre, but came to downtown soon after to look for friends, and had seen the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, the horror of the multitudes of dead bodies floating in the river. Now, as a way of dealing with those images he writes 17 syllable haiku poems about the bombing, and publishes them on his own ‘Haiku of Hiroshima’ website. I photographed Yasuhiko Shigemoto-san near the dome, with a book of his haiku.

In 2005 I undertook many Hiroshima and Nagasaki related stories. A slightly unusual take on the history was covering the story of Shigeaki Mori, an historian and survivor of Hiroshima Atomic bombing, as he campaigned to add to the official list of Nagasaki bomb victims the name of British Royal Air Force Corporal Ronald Francis Shaw, of the RAF 84 Squadron. Corporal Shaw was killed in Nagasaki on 9th August 1945 in the atomic bombing, and is the only known British person to have died in either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings. At the time when Richard Lloyd Parry of The Times and I met Shigeaki Mori he was searching to find any remaining relatives of Cpl. Shaw, and subsequently through our article he found them. Shaw’s name has now been added to the official list of bombing victims, and you can see an image of Shaw on the database of victims in the Nagasaki Museum. I photographed Shigeaki Mori in the beautifully kept Commonwealth War Cemetery, in Yokohama, beside a plaque bearing Corporal Shaw’s name. As I stood nearby, Mori-san was lost in thought, then slowly he dropped to his knees to pray.

Another slightly different take on the story was, again with good friend and colleague Richard Lloyd Parry of The Times, that of Motoharu Nakagawa in Kokura city. Kokura city was on the list of target cities for the bombing on 9th August, but due to fate and cloud cover, escaped being bombed. Instead ‘Bock’s Car’ flew on to Nagasaki to drop it’s deadly load there. Nakagawa-san was 8 years old in 1945, but he tells his story of seeing a US bomber flying above Kokura city on 9th August 1945, flying round and round in circles before flying off. Now he tells his story, not only of that day, but also of what would have happened to Kokura should the bomb have been dropped.

But perhaps the most remarkble stories I shot that year, in 2005, were those of ‘double hibakusha’, ie people who were unlucky enough to have been in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and lucky enough to have survived both bombings. I had never imagined such people existed, never imagined I’d get the chance to listen to their stories and testimony.

For The Observer I went to meet Kazuko Sadamaru who had survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It was to be a difficult assignment. Sadamaru had broken a self-imposed 60 year silence to talk to the Observer. She felt she had done her job as a nurse to help others and did not wish to bring attention to herself. I was driven to Sadamaru-san’s home, after the journalist had originally been there, but she refused to speak to us again. She had regretted doing the interview, and ow she had no desire to be photographed. I’d come a long way from Tokyo, I felt the image was important, but she was adamant, she did not wish to be photographed. We discussed it at length on the porch of her home, and finally she decided (perhaps in the hope that I’d leave) to let me photographing her nurse’s caps, the caps she’d worn on the days of the bombings, when she had proudly done her work to help other survivors.

Perhaps the most astonishing story that I covered in 2005 (and as I’ve mentioned before on this blog) is the story of Akira Iwanaga, Kuniyoshi Sato and Tsutomu Yamaguchi. The 3 gents were friends from Nagasaki, but in the last months of the war were sent to Hiroshima by their emlpoyer to work. On there last day in Hiroshima they were all caught by the bomb, but survived, and struggled home to Nagasaki. Only to be bombed again 3 days later. But again theyball survived and when I met them in 2005, 60 years after that awful week, they were still alive, and still friends. The story is best told by reading Richard Lloyd Parry’s article and interviews with the men, a story which won Richard a Foreign Correspondent of the Year award that year. (Due to The Times new paywall I can’t find the story on the Times site, but here it is here, on another website…). You can also read about Yamaguchi-san in a few other places, The Independent interview by David McNeill, The Guardian by Justin McCurry…). As I’ve mentioned before working on this story, the story of the three men, has been one of the most memorabvle and fascinating stories of my career.

And then last week, just before the 65th anniversary of the bombings I had an arduous day down to Hiroshima and Tokuyama to photograph two hibakusha. In Tokuyama my taxi delivered me to the worng danchi apartment block, in the mid day sweltering humid heat. I knocked on the worong door, made some phone calls, and finally made my way to the right apartment block, the correct door, and Kawamoto-san hanging out his window to guide me. Once inside, he handed me an ice coffee with condensation on the glass, a small sign of his generous and welcoming hospitable nature. Within a few minutes I was shooting his portrait as he applied his medicated ointments to his keloid scars. At the age of 17 he was caught in the Hiroshima bombing, but badly burned he survived. But as he explained to me, that one day changed his life. The scars he obtained that day, and the inumerbale operations since, have given him pain every day for the past 65 years. The pain he described as a needling pain boring through him every night. One day, but a lifetime of pain.