Title: Chikuho no Kodomotachi / The Children of Chikuho
Photographer(s): Domon Ken
Writer(s): Tsutomu Kitazawa
Designer(s): Yusaku Kamekura
Publisher(s): Tsukiji Shokan, Tokyo, Japan
Year: 1991
Print run:
Language(s): Japanese
Pages: 104
Size: 19,5 x 26 cm
Binding: Hardcover with dustjaket
Edition: 1st 1960 , 2nd 1977
Print: Doi Print, Tokyo, Japan
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Japan, 1959
ISBN:
Domon Ken, who was a member of the Communist Party, used his pictures to portray the wounds and scars of a disintegrated post-war Japanese society.
Domon produced many photographs of children and particularly on the island of Kyūshū where he denounced the misery of the villages in the Chikuhō mining areas. Japan's policies of conversion from coal to oil resulted in the closure of mines and a rise in the unemployment rate with the consequent increase in malnutrition among the children of the unemployed.
In particular, Domon wanted to follow the day of two little sisters, Rumie Sayuri, aged 11 and 7, in the Akashi barracks in Chikuhō. The publication was a great success, reaching one hundred thousand copies.
This new 1977 re-edition follows the initial 1960 edition, which, as the new introduction comments, sold for very high prices in collectors' shops, a fact that, as the author writes, "does not make me satisfied, thinking of the miserable lives of those children".