The end of imagination
There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, re-invented and made our own. We must seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us.
—Arundhati Roy
A key value underlying the spirit of Kyoto Journal is “peace.” Whether individual peace or world peace, our counter-cultural roots have manifested themselves in a humanistic perspective that is anti-war, anti-nationalism, and pro-peace, pro-imagination.
One of the most powerful examples of this value is our publication of Arundhati Roy’s essay, The End of Imagination, a passionate denunciation of nuclear weapons. Published a year after her widely acclaimed first novel, The God of Small Things, her essay is even more prescient today. Calling for sanity in an insane age, she wrote, “If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements—the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water—will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible.”
Roy’s words are accompanied by Shōmei Tōmatsu’s equally powerful images of the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. Shōmei, now recognized as the most important photographer of post-war Japan, was commissioned in 1960 by Gensuikyō, the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, to document and share with the world the horrific effects of the bombing. His images of everyday objects—a watch or a bottle, warped and ruined by the terrible power of the nuclear blast—and his portraits of hibakusha, victims of the atomic bombing, are all the more haunting because of their focus on the small and intimate details of people’s lives.
The title page of the article features an image from an atomic bomb test made by scientist, inventor, and high-speed photographer Harold Edgerton for the US Atomic Energy Commission. Using a specially designed, ultra-high-speed camera positioned seven miles from the blast site, he was able to capture the instantaneous, incandescent flash of a nuclear explosion in progress. In contrast to Shōmei Tōmatsu’s images, this document of pure, fearsome power lacks any trace of humanity.
Photograph courtesy of Tōmatsu Yasuko. Special thanks to Kaetsu Takayuki and the Misha Shin Gallery.
JA