Untitled (Kadena, Okinawa)

After three years spent seeking permission to enter Okinawa—a group of Japanese South Sea islands annexed by the United States following World War II—Shomei Tomatsu finally gained entry in 1969. Tomatsu was initially opposed to American military control. This picture, a photomontage, is one of a series made to suggest the terror caused by bomber flights on a nation that had recently endured nuclear holocaust. As he wrote to accompany the series’s first publication (also in 1969): “B-52s are enormous bomb-machines—they can travel all over the world with a single aerial refueling—that can carry two 24-megaton hydrogen bombs, 10,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Okinawans call the B-52s ‘assassin of the sky’ or ‘black death machines’ and are afraid of them.