Message from IRI and TOSHI Maruki-Iri Maruki (left), 1901-1995-Toshi Maruki (right), 1912-2000

MARUKI GALLERY FOR THE HIROSHIMA PANELS,
established by Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, husband andwife, is famous for its message for peace all over theworld.
Nearly at the end of the World War II, two atomic bombs
were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which
destroyed more than 300,000 lives.
Japanese-style painter Iri Maruki, born in Hiroshima, andWestern-style painter Toshi Maruki went into Hiroshimacity just three days after the bombing.
They were shocked by the terrible disaster caused by
the atomic bombs.
They made decision to make victims' agony, sufferings
and wishes for peace known to everybody and spent 30
years painting the great, all 15, "HIROSHIMA PANELS".
OTHER WORKS:
They were, of course, aware of the responsibility ofJapanese people as murderers.
Those paintings of 'Nanking Massacre,' 'Auschwitz' and'Minamata' gained support among all the people aroundthe world and Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki were
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.
Maruki Gallery also
permanently exhibits
magnificent landscapepaintings by Iri Maruki,
wonderfuldrawings
andvivid
original
pictures for picture
books by Toshi Maruki
andwarmhearted
paintings of Suma Maruki, mother of Iri, who started
painting when she was over 70 years old and was
accepted for In-ten exhibition several times.
AROUND THE GALLERY:
Maruki Gallery has been taking the initiative inenvironmentalist movement, making use of natural
sunlight for inner lighting and a septic tank for sewage.
The Gallery overlooks the Tokigawa River andsurrounding beautiful landscape known as the Hiki hills.
You can enjoy a barbecue on the shore of the river.
Near the gallery, you can make use of "National
Women's Education Center" for seminars and lodging.
You can also visit such nearby facilities as "Peace
Museum Of Saitama," "Saitama Children's Zoo,""Musashi Kyuryo National Government Park".
Please have a nice day with wonderful pictures andwonderful natural scenery at MARUKI GALLERY.

We lost our uncle to the Atomic Bomb and our two
young nieces were killed ; our younger sister sufferedburns and our father died after six months ; many friends
perished.
Iri left Tokyo for Hiroshima on the first train from Tokyo,
three days after the Bomb was dropped.
Toshi followed a few days later.
Two kilometers from the center of the explosion, thefamily house was still standing.
But the roof and roof tiles were mostly gone, windows
had been blown out, and even the pans, dishes, andchopsticks had been blasted out of their places in the
kitchen. In what was left of the burned structure, rescued
bomb victims were gathered together and lay on thefloor from wall to wall until it was full.
We carried the injured, cremated the dead, searched forfood, and found scorched sheets of tin to patch the roof.
With the stench of death and the flies and the maggots
all around us, we wandered about in the same manneras those who had experienced the Bomb.
In the beginning of September, back in Tokyo, we heard
for certain that the war had ended.
In Hiroshima, we hadn't known.
It had never entered our minds--at that time, we couldn't
think beyond what we were seeing and doing.
Three years passed before we began to paint what we
had seen. We began to paint our own nude bodies tobring back the images of that time, and others come topose for us because we were painting the Atomic Bomb.
We thought about a 17-year-old girl having had a17-year life span, and 3-year-old child having had a lifeof three years.
Nine hundreds sketches were merged together to create
the first paintings.
We thought we had painted a tremendous number ofpeople, but there were260,000 people who diedin Hiroshima. As weprayed for the blessing of
the dead with a fervent
hope that it never happen
again, we realized thateven if we sketched andpainted all of our lives, we
could never paint them all.
One Atomic Bomb in one instant caused the deaths ofmore people than we could ever portray.
Long-lasting radioactivity and radiation sickness are
causing people to suffer and die even now.
This was not a natural disaster.
As we painted, through our paintings, these thoughtcame to run through and through our mind.
(Iri Maruki, Toshi Maruki)

1(1)GHOSTS"Hurry! Get out, quick!" someone shouted.
"I can't!" came the mother's cry from beneaththe heavy beams.
"Then, the child!" the other shouted.
"You must escape yourself!
My child will be died with me.
It was a procession of ghosts in an instant allclothing burned off hands, faces, and breasts
swelled.
The purple blisters on their skin were soon burst
and peeled off hanging down like pieces of rags.
With hands lifted half up, they were ghosts inprocession.

She would only be lost streets."
Helping hands were pushed away.
And mother and child were devoured
by swift flames of vermillion.
(3) WATER

Dragging their ragged skin behind themexhausted, they fell down moaning in heaps anddied one after another.
At center of explosion, the temperature reached
six thousand degrees.
A human shadow remained on a stone step
nearby.
Could a body vaporize?
Did it blow away? There is no one to tell what it
was like at that moment at the center.
Burned charred faces, no one could tell one fromanother. Voices weakened, they told their names
but even then were unrecognized.
An infant with innocent face and delicate skinlay asleep
Was it saved in mother's tender breast?
Oh, that even this one babe will awake to rise up
again(2) FIRE

Feet outward, heads inward.
Mountains of corpses.
Layer upon layer of bodies piled so as not to see
the eyes, the mouths, the noses.
In one forgotten hear of bodies not yet burned
was an eyeball looking out and watching us.
Was it alive?
Was just a maggot putting false life into a deadface?
Water, water.
All was wandering searching for water.
Fleeing from the licking flames searching for alast drop of water.
A mother being hurt clutching her child runningalong the river.
Falling into the deep part and scrambling backdesperately to the shallow.

"PIKA!" The blue-white light of the flash
the explosion-the force-the heat wave-Never in heaven or on earth had humankind
experienced this.
In an instant all burst into flames and the ruins
were ablaze.
The dead silence of the vast desert broken.
Some fell senseless under fallen debris,others desperately digging out.

Run! Through the fierce flames enveloping
the river.
She stopped just to cool her face in the water.
Run! Run!
Finally she reached here.
And she gave breast to babe and found out it notalive.
A portrait of mother and her child in the 20th
century. Wounded mother and dead infant,the statue of despair.
Let the mother and child be a symbol of hope as
it has always been. It must be!

All consumed by the crimson.
Glass shards pierced bellies,arms and legs werelost. People fell and were taken by the fire.
2

(4) RAINBOW

Two sisters embraced each other in disfigured
human shapes.
Nearby, young girls without a scratch lay dead.
"My little girl was the only one of her whole class
to live. But her fingers were all burned and stuck
together and her face and neck became one.

A naked soldier with a sword and in military boots.
A soldier with broken arms and crushed legs.
And covering their ragged skin with blankets
sick soldiers hurrying to nowhere.
Stillness on the earth.
Dead silence like the sound of water sinking into
the ground.
Suddenly a maddened soldier pointed to theheavens screaming over and over.

She has never walked again and hasn't grownsince that day-She was thirteen then."
So related a carpenter, a victim himself looking at
this painting.
(6)ATOMIC DESERT"Here it comes!
The B-29!"
There was no shadow of an airplane anywhere.
Wounded horses, frenzied horses.
Raging crazy.
American soldiers who had come to bombard
this land were taken prisoner and held captive unarmy barracks.

There was no food, nor medicine.
Houses were all burned, the rain came in.
No electricity, no newspaper to read, no radio,
No doctor.

The Atomic Bomb kills foe and friend-Two of them still in handcuffs were found lying on
the side of the road near the Dome.

Both the dead and wounded were food formaggots, and swarms of flies buzzed.
The odor of the corpses was on the wind.

Dust and smoke from the hell blown high up in
the sky.
The cloud poured large raindrops from its
swelling shape.

The Atomic Bomb exploded in human hearts
as well as upon human bodies.
Heedless of naked and ragged skin, they would
search for lost children day after day.

And darkened was the sky .
But lo! a rainbow appeared brilliantly in the sevencolors.

Even now, human bones are found in the soil in
Hiroshima.

(5) BOYS AND GIRLS

Lying dead in lines along the riverbanks.
Heads together longing for the water.
They lay stacked back to from head to foot anddied.
None recieved that last drop of water flowing
below the steep banks.
The boys and girls had been mobilized to do
adult work that day to tear down buildings.
Whole classes died together.

(7) BAMBOO THICKETS

Bamboo thickets were the only shelter for thepeople.
"It wasn't an earthquake.
But what was it?""A ball of flame bombs?""It was some kind of bomb.""No, it was a death ray.""There was a flash and boom...""No, there wasn't any boom in Hiroshima.
It must have been too loud.
Only flash--PIKA!"
The people called that unknown thing PIKA.
3

Just outside Hiroshima mane bamboo thickets
grew.The bamboo stalks were all burnt on theside facing the city center.
The homeless found refuge in the thickets andthere one by one breathed their final breaths.
We no longer had the courage to answer thepleas for help.
There was no more space in our house for the
wounded to lie.

It was 1945.
For the first time in human history, the Atomic
Bomb was dropped over Hiroshima.
And dropped once more over Nagasaki.
Then over Bikini Atoll, another first the Hydrogen
Bomb was dropped. There a fishing boat called
Lucky Dragon sailed.
The death ashes fell all around, and half a year
later Aikichi Kuboyama died in his home port ofYaizu.

Among the multitude of corpses under Mitaki
Bridge, a human figure whose age or sex no one
could tell, finally slumped in death on August 26.
After all, those long days since August 6th.

Sister's mother- and father-in-law had hundredsof glass fragments piercing their whole bodies.

There was no one to take away the corpses-A typhoon and flood in early September carried
all way out to sea.

Their ankles were swollen as thick as thighs.
From our house we put them on a cart and pulled
it to their oldest son's home in Kaita walking by
the center of the blast.

(8) RESCUE

It rained softly all day that day.
It rained often in Hiroshima after the Bomb.
Midsummer but it seemed cold every day.

The blaze was unceasing.
People searching for relatives and taking themhome but on the way found them dying.
Food was being rationed out to the long line.
There a young woman clutching hardtack for her
family fell over and died.

In tears she told us.
She said "Mother, forgive me!", as she left her
and ran.
Husband left wife, wife left husband, parent leftchild, child left parent.
Rescue--it came later.
(10) PETITION

Sister's mother- and father-in-law had hundredsof glass fragments piercing their whole bodies.
Their ankles were swollen as thick as thighs.
From our house we put them on a cart and pulled
it to their oldest son's home in Kaita walking by
the center of the blast.
It rained softly all day that day.
It rained often in Hiroshima after the Bomb.
Midsummer but it seemed cold every day.
In tears she told us.
She said "Mother, forgive me!", as she left her
and ran.
Husband left wife, wife left husband, parent leftchild, child left parent.
Rescue--it came later.

Stop the Atomic Bomb!
Stop the Hydrogen Bomb!
Stop War!
In Tokyo's Suginami Ward, a petition begun by
women spread all over Japan.
Children, mothers, fathers, old people, workers
of all kinds -- everyone signed.
For the first time, the people of Japan asserted
themselves with a silent cry.
A voice that echoed throughout the land.
A call for peace.
(11) MOTHER AND CHILD(9) YAIZU

Under the shattered structures amidst theexcruciating flames.
4Parent left child, child left parent, husband left
wife, wife left husband.
Nowhere to escape to.
Figures fleeing in all directions.
This was the Atomic Bomb.
In the midst of this, how eerie-Mothers' loving arms shielding their babies fromdeath, dying themselves.
There were oh! so many.
(12) FLOATING LANTERNS

On August sixth every year, the seven rivers ofHiroshima are filled with lanterns.
Painted with the names of fathers, mothers, andsisters, they float on their way to the sea.
Almost there, pushed back flame snuffed out.
Darkly coming back in pieces.
Tossed by ocean waves.
That time, years past, these same rivers werefilled.
With the corpses of those fathers, mothers andsisters.
(13) DEATH OF AMERICAN PRISONERS OF
WAR(14) CROWS

Koreans and Japanese look alike.
In those mercilessly charred faces how can one
see a difference?
"After the Bomb, the bodies of the Koreans wereleft on the streets to the very last.
Some were alive but few. Nothing to be done.
Crows descending from the sky. Hoedes ofcrows.
Coming down to eat the eyes of the Koreans.
Eat the eyes."*
Even in death, Koreans were discriminatedagainst.
Even at death, Japanese discriminated against
Koreans. Asian both, hit by the Bomb.
Beautiful chima chogori.
Flying through the sky to Korea the homeland.
We respectfully offer this painting.
We pray.
NOTE:
In the Mitsubishi Shipyards in Nagasaki, there
were forced laborers from Korea numbering
more than 5000.
There were also many Korean forced laborers in
Hiroshima. In South Korea alone today, there areapproximately 15,000 Atomic Bomb survivors
who have no official recognition as such as havereceived no assistance.
(15) NAGASAKI

By your bomb, 300,000 Japanese died but yourown died too—23 of your youth.
Before the Atomic Bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, Americans on B-29 bomb raids
parachuted down and were taken prisoner.
Women as well as men.
In What atate were they at the end?
We wondered about their shoes, their clothes.
Upon going to Hiroshima we were dumbfounded.
Kept in an underground shelter near the center ofthe blast the P.O.W.s would have perishedanyway.
Or could they have lived?
But the surviving prisoners, in fact, were tortured
and murdered by their enraged captors, theJapanese.
Our hands trembled as we painted the death ofAmerican prisoners of war.

The target of Kokura covered by clouds, two
B-29s on to Nagasaki.
Chased by more clouds.
Mitsubishi Steelworks skirting the town the newtarget. Drop it!
Just above Uragami Cathedral it exploded.
Instantaneously annihilating the priests andbelievers and all.
The cathedral at the center.
Endless concentric halo-like circles of deadhuman beings.
In Nagasaki it was a plutonium bomb.
Stronger than the one in Hiroshima.
Nagasaki in ruins 140,000 killed.
No more Atomic Bomb.
5