Nuclear Testing in the Pacific: The Lucky Dragon Incident and the Family of Man

This chapter focuses on the crucial role of media coverage of the Lucky Dragon No. 5 fishing trawler incident in March 1954, a time when Occupation-period censorship had only been recently lifted. Newspapers such as the Yomiuri Shimbun and the Nippon Times, along with the illustrated magazine Asahi Gurafu (Asahi Graph) used photographs to give readers a heightened sense of the drama of events. In the aftermath of the controversy, the US-backed Family of Man exhibition sought to project a more universal image of humanity. A large photographic mural of images of the devastation at Nagasaki taken by the Japanese photographer Yamahata Yōsuke was specially prepared for the exhibition when it toured Japan, but it was controversially hidden from view when Emperor Hirohito visited the exhibition in Tokyo on 23 March 1956