In the early 1960s, Hisashi Inoue, the author of the original play "The Face of Jizo," was working under contract as a writer at NHK. The idea for the play came when he was sent to Hiroshima in the summer to do a program about the anti-nuclear movement.
"I met victims of the bomb and I immediately thought: 'Well, I can't write about this. It is just too awful,' " he recalled in a recent interview. "Anyway, I did manage to write the program when I returned to Tokyo, and that was that.
"But around this time some authors, like Kenzaburo Oe, were taking up Hiroshima and writing about it. And there was a swing away, in Hiroshima, from the politicized peace image of the bomb. It was then that I thought I could sit down and write a play."