NPR’s All Things Considered has an interesting biography (audio, 7:30 min.) of Japanese hibakusha (Atomic bombing survivor) artist, Ikuo Hirayama, who is now in his 70s.

Many of his friends died. Hirayama grew ill from radiation sickness and his white-blood-cell count plummeted, but eventually he recovered. He left Hiroshima, adopted Buddhism as a way of honoring the dead, and took up painting, practicing an ancient technique called Nihonga, in which colors are blended from ground-up mineral pigments, then attached to the canvas with glue.

Hirayama became famous as a painter of Buddhist images and of the Silk Road, the highway that brought Buddhism to Japan. His Silk Road paintings convey Hirayama’s belief that the road, with its exchange of commerce and ideas, showed that cultures can interact constructively. The paintings epitomize a sense of hopefulness and cooperation, peace and tranquility, the antithesis to Hiroshima, 1945.

One of Hirayama’s most powerful works is a huge, six-paneled canvas called “The Holocaust of Hiroshima.” It’s a striking painting; most of the canvas is a blood-red sky, filled with wisps of dirty clouds. In the upper right, the Buddhist god of wrath looks down upon the city. Hirayama says that despite the sorrow and destruction portrayed in “The Holocaust of Hiroshima,” the painting offers a message of hope.