The more you think about it, the harder it is to come up with an antinuclear poster. I thought initially to create something based on my own aesthetic principles, but felt that an abstract representation of my art and design was not appropriate to a poster intended to make a powerful appeal to many people. The idea was to come up with a poster that would appeal for an end to nuclear arms that was steeped in the reality of Hiroshima rather than forming an image on a personal, individual level.

This led me to use illustration and I came up with something that accords with my aesthetic principles, but asked the artist Tamie Okuyama to draw form due to the difficulties of satisfying established illustrators with the image I had in mind. Okuyama's illustration provides a faultless representation of my idea: the wing of a bird in flight shown in close-up, its instantaneous destruction in a flash of light even as the pain of that image is confined forever in stillness to be sublimated in pious prayer.