Months after the 1945 atomic bombing of the city of Nagasaki, a teenager whose back had been stripped of skin by the blast was filmed by an American soldier — a scene that came to be one of the most widely recognized reminders of the horrors of the nuclear attack.
The boy, grimacing in pain, was Sumiteru Taniguchi. He survived, and eventually put himself in the forefront of Japan's antinuclear campaign, often baring the scars engraved in his flesh, until he died at the age of 88 in 2017.
Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, which followed the similar attack on Hiroshima three days earlier, Taniguchi's detailed account of his life will become available to an English-speaking audience through a book set to hit shelves in the United States next month.