My three-week visit to Japan is almost over. I came to make two final portraits for the exhibition Poppies: Women and War. Female survivors (hibakusha) of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I met four women who were schoolgirls when the bomb was dropped on them in 1945, changing their lives forever.
I attended both 70th Anniversary ceremonies and heard Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan re-assure his people of his pledge to keep Japan peaceful. Some are sceptical.
A week later I watch online coverage of the WWII VJ Day back home. Hear of the barbaric torture, abuse and starvation of British POWs at the hands of the Japanese military.
In these days of remembrance I have seen hundreds of young people carrying placards appealing for an end to war. Seen the words 'Never again x' scratched on a wall. Seen footage of civilians on all sides burnt and butchered. Heard apologies, speeches of remorse. Comments such as 'they started it so they needed to be taught a lesson'. Really? It was a dirty bomb for civilians, not just soldiers, and their bodies are still burning, 70 years on.
I heard dIrect appeals from survivors, visitors, tourists, against the making, stockpiling and continued testing of weapons of mass destruction by all the leading powers.
Meanwhile major art exhibitions on war and peace are being staged in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Osaka. They bring together gut-wrenching expressions of shock, outrage and sympathy by Kathe Kollwitz, Picasso, Otto Dix, Hamada Chimei and war photographers Robert Capa and Tomatsu Shomei. I see them all. Profound statements that leave me ashamed, bewildered and questioning. Mainly baffled by the insanity of war and the playground mentality of 'He hit me so I am going to hit him harder'.
Working on Poppies: Women and War – from women of WWI (the war to end all wars) and this, the ultimate in destruction of life, the nuclear weapon – I am reminded of how the chief, the dictator, the emperor, the president or the general rarely gets burnt to charcoal or has his eyeballs torn out. It is the young lads marching off to fight evil, or the schoolgirls who are taught only their side of the story.
Mostly it is the woman, and her child, who suffer.
This image will stay with me. A pencil drawing by 17-year-old Yokoyama Ayumi, a third-year student I met in Hiroshima. She drew a schoolgirl shackled by her ankles to the charred ruins of her city. She says:
''It has been 70 years since the WWII ended. As time goes by fewer and fewer people experienced the war, and that event is becoming vague. However I wonder if tragic history would be repeated if we completely forgot that event. The chains of the picture give us warning as we are becoming indifferent to the past. We should hand down the war and the tragedy of that in order not to repeat the same mistake.''
