Though just a child, the headline in the morning newspaper: “New Type of Bomb…” sixty years ago, left an indelible impression on my innocent sensibility. During the massed air raids over Tokyo of March that year, I had seen the sky turn red from Chiba, the place I’d been evacuated to. Many family members and friends were lost in that blitz. The cycle of war has continued unbroken since that time. Attempts to negate this with the phrase “the horror of war” leave me feeling hollow and empty. One of my peers survived the bombing of Hiroshima. We became friends as fellow designers. Still suffering the after-effects of the bombing, in 1985, this man began work on a series of one hundred posters calling for peace: “The devastation remains fresh in my mind. I want to think about peace and love not in the immediate context of those images but within a visual framework that goes beyond it.” He died at the age of 59 having failed to fulfill this ambition. An exhibition of this works is being staged this summer.

Although the sadness of Shu Kataoka was bottomless, there was a need for me to devote all my energy to this poster, having a link with him in my mind. Wars in distant countries; conflict among ethnic groups; indiscriminate terrorism: in producing this poster I had to clear my mind repeatedly of doubts about my ability to communicate the preciousness of human life in a single poster. The result: an upbeat poster that will either amuse or irritate. If nothing