Detailed photos of horoshima bombing

March 7, 2017

Enlarged photos detail A-bomb’s destruction of Hiroshima

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201703070050.html

By YOSUKE TAKASHIMA/ Staff Writer

HIROSHIMA--A professor has produced perhaps the most detailed aerial photos of Hiroshima before and after the atomic bombing, giving historians an even better grasp of the destruction of the city.

Yukihiro Yoshida, a fine arts professor specializing in product design at Hiroshima City University, and Kensuke Hashimoto, a teaching associate at the university, enlarged and created higher resolution versions of photographs taken by U.S. forces during and after World War II.

The Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons, had donated the images to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in July last year.

The photos were likely presented to U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who greenlighted the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Yoshida and Hashimoto divided each photo into two sections and took pictures of them separately. When the new pictures of the images were combined, each photograph contained about 150 million pixels.

The photos include aerial shots of downtown Hiroshima around April-July 1945. Other pictures taken a day after the atomic bombing show smoke rising from some areas of the city.

The Atomic Bomb Dome--currently part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park--standing amid the leveled city, as well as planes on an airfield, can be seen in two photographs taken on Sept. 7, 1945.

“There are possibilities that we can assess the damages in more detail with the enlarged images,” said Ryo Koyama, a curator at the museum, which is currently analyzing the photos. “We also hope to use the images to identify when undated photographs of Hiroshima were taken.”