Superflat! The Exploding Art of Takashi Murakami

Abstract

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m., the power of the atom was unleashed against humanity for the first time in history. Piloted by Paul Tibbets, the U.S> B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb - dubbed "Little Boy" - on the city of Hiroshima. Those Japanese who experienced the blast referred to it as the pika-don. This was a euphemism that described the. "Blinding flash and ensuing blast of the atomic bombs." The center of the instantaneous, blinding pulse from the detonation reached nearly 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit; to those who were near the center, it brought instant death as human beings passed from being to nothingness, "faster than any human physiology can register. Among those who died from the bomb, they were the lucky ones and presumably knew nothing." The pika-don of Little Boy (followed by Fat Man's own pika-don over Nagasaki three days later) was the single most devastating attack in human history. It was a portend of Japan's momentous surrender and the first "push" in the case of falling dominoes that spelt out the end the Pacific War, and with it, the end of the Imperial Japanese Empire. Given the enormity of the atomic bombs as weapons, how have the visceral feelings of those who experienced the trauma of the pika-don been transmitted through the generations to survive in Japanese society to this day? In Japan, the subject of the atomic bombs is relatively taboo in daily conversation, however the traumas of the atomic attacks have been transmitted vicariously for years. The traumas have permeated the Japanese consciousness to its core and remain an influential force to this day; nowhere is this more visible than in popular art. This can bee seen with art in the immediate postwar period. John Dower notes that the immediate atmosphere of the postwar was one where time was peculiarly warped and that: "...the Japanese did not begin to really visualize the human consequences of the bombs in concrete, vivid was until three or four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed. The first graphic depiction of victims seen in Japan were not photographs but drawing and paintings by the wife-and-husband artists Toshi Maruki and Iri Maruki, who had rushed to Hiroshima, where they had relatives, as soon as news of the bomb arrived." While the Marukis went on to publish a books of black and white drawings titled Pika-don, and exhibit murals documenting the horrors of the atomic aftermath in Hiroshima, the rest of japan remained uniformed; actual photographs of the effects of the bombs remained censored until the end of the U.S. occupation in 1953. However, the talented cartoonist Katō Esturō captured the early postwar sentiment of a defeated and exhausted nation, emasculated by two atomic bombs. Katō's own loyalties admittedly shifted with the political winds as before the Japanese surrender he had, "thrown his considerable skills into the war effort" creating anti-western propaganda. However, he apparently "came to his senses" after the war ended; on the first anniversary of Japanese surrender, he published a collection entitled Okurareta Kakumei. This translates roughly into, "The Revolution We Have Been given." The opening illustration depicts an exhausted couple sprawled out on the ground, on August 15, 1945, the day of Japan's surrender. The man clutches a bamboo spear and the woman wears the protective hood worn by those fighting fires from the relentless U.S. air raids. Behind the couple is a radio, no doubt a symbol of the emperor's surrender broadcast. The caption of the cartoon speaks of the stupidity of pitting bamboo spears against atomic bombs.