
Remains
- Publisher
- Akaaka Art Publishing
- Year
- 2025
- ISBN
- 978-4-86541-217-8
- Specifications
- Hardcover
230 x 304 mm
136 pages
Two cover versions (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) with identical contents
Night photographs of the hibaku jumoku, the trees that survived within about two kilometres of the hypocentre of the atomic bombings, made by Kunihiko Katsumata in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 2005. As of March 2025, 159 survivor trees have been identified in Hiroshima and fifty in Nagasaki; eighty years on, many are damaged, decayed or fallen, while saplings grown from them are distributed as symbols of peace. The trees still carry the traces of the bomb: on one side of a trunk charred, tense bark, on the other swelling and leaning, a living form that holds time. They were photographed at night to catch their faint breathing, not as monuments or symbols but as beings that still contain the war. Remains means not debris but everything the bomb continues to leave in the world, a requiem for the living.