When I was a young girl in primary school, our teacher brought a thick photo book to class and asked us to pass it around. I can’t even remember exactly what year I was in, but the intense sensation and fear I felt from the images in that book remain vivid decades later. Most of us only managed to look at a couple of pages before passing it along. The page I saw showed a girl about our age, her face blackened and burned, covered in thick, horrible keloids. Her skin and flesh, melted by the intense heat, hung from her bones like a slimy substance, slipping down toward the ground.

It was a brave—and some might say controversial—decision for our teacher to show such shocking images to young children. But I appreciate it deeply. One clever, somewhat cheeky boy in the class proudly announced, “The Americans used the atomic bombs to end the war sooner.” That’s what most of us were made to believe until recently, when formerly strictly confidential U.S. documents revealed another perspective.

Hiroshima is not far from my hometown, and I’ve visited the Atomic Bomb Memorial Park and museums many times. The park is always filled with tens of thousands of paper cranes, folded by people praying for the dead and for world peace. There’s a simple memorial stone overlooking the Atomic Dome, one of the few structures that survived the blast because it was made from steel and stone, unlike the typical Japanese wooden buildings. Inscribed on the stone are the words: “Please rest in peace. We will never make this mistake again.”

My work ‘Under the Cloud’ was triggered by the film Oppenheimer, which received numerous Oscar awards. The movie focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who pushed for the creation of the atomic bomb and urged President Truman to drop two different types of bombs on Japan. The film portrays him as a complicated hero. But watching the scene of scientists and officials cheering for Oppenheimer’s success transported me back to my primary school classroom—to that deep fear and sadness I felt as a child. The river that once carried the burned bodies of those who sought water in desperation after the bombing now hosts tourists rowing boats, unaware of its history. Today, even young Japanese people admire the movie’s actor, celebrating him without fully understanding the legacy of his character.

That’s when I knew I had to create this work. I want people to remember and not forget what the Japanese people experienced: the horror of nuclear bombs, and the horror of humanity’s disregard for others.