Eighty years after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, BYU design students and professors traveled to Japan, where they spent time at monuments, museums, and other contemplative spaces to learn about the tragedy and feel historical resonance. “We were interested in what that would mean for us to learn from the past,” says illustration professor Melissa Crowton (BFA ’13). “What does that mean for us in a world where it’s rarely peaceful all over?”
Upon returning to campus, students designed and illustrated posters inspired by what they learned in Japan in the context of the broader theme of peace, creating a campus gallery show called Down Wind Peace.
Graphic design student Shumpei Suzuki (’26) created his poster Hands in the Afterglow, above, with crayon for the raw, emotional texture of that medium. The color palette was inspired by drawings—created by bombing survivors—that Suzuki saw at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
The shadowy figures holding hands are, as he describes it, “their spirit—it’s what remained in sight when the light was too strong and it hit the people, and the shadow was left there,” Suzuki says. “That was shocking.”
Suzuki grew up in Japan but never felt much of a connection to the bombings before this trip. “That has changed,” he says. For Suzuki, peace is not the endgame of a distant future, but something we can strive to achieve here and now.
“I think peace is the state of trying to understand,” he says. “It’s holding hands—we’re all in the same time, same world, same hardship. The act of trying to understand is powerful because it may actually change our point of view too. It opens our world.”
