(Total of 126: 100 negatives and 26 prints)
The materials include 106 photos taken by Hajime Miyatake, a staff photographer at the Osaka head office of the Asahi Shimbun who entered Hiroshima on August 9. He was the photographer who took the largest number of photos of Hiroshima within one week of the bombing, capturing a variety of views of the city’s devastation, including a woman with severe burns to her face (HMIYATAKE0060), a boy undergoing treatment for his burns (HMIYATAKE0067), and a site for the cremation of the dead (HMIYATAKE0076).
During the occupation of Japan by the U.S. military and other Allied Forces, a time when news coverage of the atomic bombings was restricted under the press controls such as censorship that had been imposed by the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers (GHQ), Mr. Miyatake was ordered by his superiors to incinerate the negatives. Despite that, he was able to preserve the negatives by hiding the film in a space under the floor of his home. In 1952, the year the occupation of Japan ended, his photos, including one that captured a woman who had been exposed to the A-bombing’s thermal rays (HMIYATAKE0060), were introduced in the August 6, 1952, special issue of the magazine Asahi Graph (around 700,000 copies of which were printed) under the title “Genbaku Higai no Hatsu-Koukai” (in English, ‘First look at A-bomb devastation’). As a result, the photos gained wide renown and were ultimately carried in Life Magazine. Those prints and negatives are currently archived at the Asahi Shimbun’s Tokyo head office. Eiichi Matsumoto, a photographer who worked in the publication office of the Asahi Shimbun, took 20 photos at that time. During the occupation period, Mr. Matsumoto was also able to hold on to his photos, the prints of which are archived at the Asahi Shimbun’s Osaka head office. One of his photos (EMATSUMOTO0003) was carried in the same special issue of the Asahi Graph.
- Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum special exhibition : Photographs by Hajime Miyatake and Eiichi Matsumoto-Hiroshima after the Atomic Bombing (2006)
- Asahi Photo Archives
The Asahi Shimbun Digital Photo Feature: “Photographic testimonies from A-bombed Hiroshima”
Contact: shashin@asahi.com