"Iwas put in charge of this unbearably painful filming job. Even if you consider a war between two countries to be unavoidable, why, you wonder, must innocent civilians be forced to go through such suffering?
"But a cameraman must face up to whatever he films, however horrified he is by it. It struck me that this film record would someday, in some way, come to serve a purpose."
Thus wrote Harry Mimura — or, to use his Japanese name, Akira Mimura — on his journey from Tokyo to Nagasaki and Hiroshima and some 20 other devastated Japanese cities in March and April 1946.