Hiroshima Appeals 2024
Hiroshima Appeals Poster Campaign
The Hiroshima Appeals is a poster campaign themed on Hiroshima’s Spirit that transcends words to widely convey the prayers and wishes of Hiroshima, which experienced the ravages of the first atomic bomb used on mankind. Since 1983, with the first poster Burning Butterflies by Yusaku Kamekura, JAGDA has designated a member designer to produce a poster each year until 1990, and resumed in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. The posters are presented to the mayor of Hiroshima City every year, and were presented to member cities of Mayors of Peace in 2005 and 2008. They were also exhibited at Press Centre of G7 Hiroshima Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in 2016. In this way the posters have promoted peace at home and abroad.
Sponsors:
Hiroshima International Cultural Foundation
Hiroshima Peace Creation Fund
Japan Graphic Design Association Inc. (JAGDA) Hiroshima Chapter
Cooperation:
Designers:
1983 Yusaku Kamekura, 1984 Kiyoshi Awazu, 1985 Shigeo Fukuda, 1986 Yoshio Hayakawa, 1987 Kazumasa Nagai, 1988 Ikko Tanaka, 1989 Mitsuo Katsui, 1990 Eiko Ishioka, 2005 Masayoshi Nakajo, 2006 Koichi Sato, 2007 Shin Matsunaga, 2008 Masuteru Aoba, 2009 Katsumi Asaba, 2010 Keisuke Nagatomo, 2011 Susumu Endo, 2012 Yukimasa Okumura, 2013 Kaoru Kasai, 2014 Tsuguya Inoue, 2015 Taku Satoh, 2016 Takahisa Kamijyo, 2017 Kenya Hara, 2018 Kazunari Hattori, 2019 Katsuhiko Shibuya, 2020 Yoshie Watanabe, 2021 Takuya Onuki, 2022 Kashiwa Sato, 2023 Norio Nakamura, 2024 Takayuki Soeda
*Posters from 2005 onwards are available for purchase at JAGDA Online Shop.
– w728mm × h1030mm / 1,100 Yen per sheet / tax inclueded
– Shipping is limited to address in Japan
Designer’s Comment
I was born five years after World War II, so I lack a real sense of what war entails. I experienced the post-war atmosphere, though, and I gained a sense of the cruelty of war and the importance of peace from the news headlines that repeated year after year. Today, wars continue to rage across the globe. How long will humankind continue to make the same mistakes?
When I received the Hiroshima Appeals commission, I sat stunned for a while and wondered how to proceed. I realized how difficult it would be to convey the horrors of the atomic bomb while espousing peace and a strong anti-war sentiment in just one poster. Was this task beyond me? I mainly create advertisements for a living. This led me to consider creating an image more grounded in reality rather than one sprung from a designer’s imagination.
While browsing through materials from that time, I came across “Hiroshima,” a photo collection by Miyako Ishiuchi. With the permission of the families and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Ishiuchi was commissioned by a publisher to photograph articles left behind by atomic bomb victims. What struck me most were the clothes worn on that fateful day. As you’d expect, these were ripped and torn. Ishiuchi explained how she had placed the items on a large lightbox to shoot them. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but despite the tragic air, the objects also had a certain beauty, perhaps because of this backlight effect. The rawness is stripped away, with the photos portraying that awful moment in a powerfully symbolic way. Ishiuchi showed it was possible to represent the horror of the atomic bomb symbolically rather than directly. These artifacts contain a strong message: “Never forget what happened.”
With Ishiuchi’s consent, I used one of these photos to create the poster. Even now, each year brings new donations of treasured artifacts from the victims’ families. Ishiuchi also continues to visit Hiroshima annually to take photographs.