The First Day of Good Weather

In the morning of the 6th of August 1945, one hour before the Enola Gay – the airplane which carried the atomic bomb – the officer Claude Eatherly flew over Hiroshima, because he had to check the weather conditions. In other cities, thousands of people got saved because it was raining that day. The night between the 8th and 9th of July 1999 Vittorio’s father and brother died in a car accident. On the 11th of March 2011 a terrible earthquake and a consequent tsunami shook the districts of Miyagi and Iwate, in Japan, and caused the death of nearly 25000 people and the destruction of 475000 houses.

The starting point of this project is a pack of letters that I found at the end of 2012. These letters, which date 1999, are the correspondence between my teen-aged brother and his Japanese girlfriend, Kaori. She continued writing and sending photos and postcards for months after the accident.

The searching for Kaori has led me to Fukushima and the Tsunami area, working as pretext to look for stories of loss and reconstruction across Japan. “The first day of good weather” was the order issued by the President of the United States Truman to drop the bomb on Japan.