Right after World War II’s end, the emeritus Swiss reporter Werner Bischof lays the first westerner eye on the archipelago and its hidden injuries. He is amongst the rare to shoot a hibakusha whose back is injured by atomic burns. Numerous writers, photographers and cineasts will follow him, fascinated by such a foreign culture. But, as Cecil Beaton did, they tend to show an immortal Japan: the one of temples, geishas or traditional theater. In all of those works, Hiroshima is once more, this time symbolically, wiped off the map. At the time, sole Swiss reporter Werner Bischof, Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais make this tragedy visible.
Saturday 29th of October 1955. Nicolas Bouvier arrives in Yokohama. His arrival does not go unnoticed; two national newspapers echo it. In Tokyo, he is planning to make a living out of animating conferences, translating, and publishing articles as well as pictures. Nicknamed the “penniless wanderer”, he succeeds in selling, less than two months after his arrival, an illustrated article which is distributed in seven million copies for New Year. He tells in thirteen pages his journey before joining Japan. An insert portrays him: “If he presents himself as a free-lance journalist [...], he is undoubtedly a “traveler”. It has been around two years and a half since he left his home country to wander through eight countries.”
Helped by a barman, he learns photographic technique, aware that it is easier to make a living out of his images than of his singular stories. He captures the children’s playground of his neighbourhood, and in the subway catches an “atomized beggar”, made blind by the bomb’s flash. But he does not diffuse the image in his book Japan of the “Travels’ atlases” collection. He observes and catches the instants of the small theater that life is.