At age 15 in 1945, Shomei Tomatsu was working at an aircraft assembly plant in Nagoya. U.S. B-29s were bombing the industrial city so relentlessly that by the end of World War II, nine out of 10 of its buildings were destroyed -- compared with five out of 10 in Tokyo.
Still, just months before the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Tomatsu paid no heed to the air-raid sirens that called out in the night. Instead of fleeing to an underground shelter, he would lie on his bed and adjust a large mirror in which he could watch the reflections of the B-29s roaring in. They were "a feast of metallic beauty" he would write later, "a pageant of light."
Echoes of those nights of terrible beauty permeate the photographs Tomatsu would take in the process of becoming the preeminent chronicler of Japan's postwar experience. No other photographer of his generation would look so long and so hard at the effects of destruction on a proud, broken and exhausted population.