Horikawa Keiko, the Forgotten Remains of Hiroshima: Tracking the dead

Abstract

In May 2016 freelance journalist Horikawa Keiko received a special award from the Japan National Press Club for her book, “Genbaku Kuyoto,” which is about victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing whose remains have been identified but not claimed. Of the five books she has published, not counting one she co-authored, four are about capital punishment. As she explains during the following press conference for “Genbaku Kuyoto,” she feels capital punishment and the bombing of Hiroshima are thematically related. Though she worked for years as a TV journalist in Hiroshima and covered stories about the bombing many times, it wasn't until she researched Japan's death penalty that she made a connection and realized how little she knew about what happened on August 6, 1945.

One of the goals of her research was to find out how the number of official dead was determined. To her, the number is important, because each life has meaning. To lose track of that number is to lose the meaning of that event. The only way she can bring them back to life is to show how a few of them lived. MT