Though for centuries woodblock printing had been a prevalent method of inexpensively and widely disseminating religious texts in Japan, it was not until the eighteenth century that this technique blossomed to bolster the creation of pictorial compositions, more complex and richly colored than the written documents previously published. These prints, known as ukiyo-e, are both...

The week of August 6, 1945, United States armed forces dropped two atomic bombs on Japan; the first landed that Monday on Hiroshima, and another arrived three days later in Nagasaki. While the attacks seemingly worked in the allies’ favor, with Japan surrendering the following week, the fallout was devastating for the island nation–it is...