Hiroshima Panels XIV Crows

Title: XIV Crows (Fourteenth of the series, Hiroshima Panels)

Creator: Maruki Toshi, Maruki Iri

Date: 1972

Culture: Japanese

Materials: Sumi ink on paper

Dimensions: 180 cm × 720 cm

Repository: Maruki Gallery

“Japanese and Koreans look alike. How could one mercilessly burned face be distinguished from another?
‘After the bomb, the last corpses to be disposed of were the Koreans. Many Japanese survived the bomb, but very few Koreans did. There was nothing we could do. Crows came flying, many of them. The crows came and ate the eyeballs of the Korean corpses. They ate the eyeballs.’ (From the writings of Ishimure Michiko.)
Koreans were discriminated against, even in death. Japanese discriminated, even against corpses. Both were Asian victims of the bomb.
Beautiful chima and chogori, fly back to Korea, to the sky over the homeland. We humbly offer this painting. We pray.
Some five thousand Koreans died en masse in Nagasaki, where they had been brought as forced labor for the Mitsubishi shipyards. There are similar stories about Koreans in Hiroshima.
In South Korea alone, nearly fifteen thousand hibakusha live today, without official recognition of their status as atomic-bomb survivors.” (Maruki Gallery)

This painting as well as the text are part of the series The Hiroshima Panels. This piece, like many of them, tells a dark and grotesque story about the aftermath of the atomic bombs in Japan. As seen, crows flooded the areas to prey on the piles of dead corpses. While the titular subject of crows is what we are visually drawn to, the text tells a story perhaps many are unaware of. The text discusses how Koreans faced the brunt of tragedies in many instances during the war. It states, very few Koreans survived the bombing, and their corpses were the last ones to be disposed of. There was a disrespect toward the Koreans, even after they had died.

The text provides us with information we could not get just from viewing the painting, however the painting evokes these dark tormented feelings that we don’t get from just the text. They work together to tell and make us feel the whole story.

There appears to be an endless stream of crows flowing into the painting and adding to the chaos of dead bodies and barely discernible faces that we see on the left-hand-side. The pile of corpses has a detailed styling that we see in many of the paintings in this series, while the crows in much of the painting are abstracted by a blur of their wings and bodies. This highlights the different artistic styles of Toshi and Iri.

References: Maruki Gallery, https://marukigallery.jp/en/hiroshimapanels/