Bakudan Sange (Sacrifice in the Bomb Blast)

Bakudan Sange (爆弾散華, 'Sacrifice in the Bomb Blast') is a 1945 painting by Kawabata Ryūshi held by the Ryūshi Memorial Museum in Ōta, Tokyo. The title combines bakudan (bomb) with sange, the Buddhist term for the scattering of flowers as a religious offering, and is sometimes translated as 'falling petals of the bomb.' The composition depicts pumpkins, leaves, and other vegetal forms scattered across the picture plane in the aftermath of a bombing raid, the everyday produce of a wartime kitchen garden converted into a memorial offering by a painter who had himself experienced the air raids on Tokyo of the final months of the Pacific War. The work belongs to the corpus of nihonga responses to the war that Ryūshi produced in 1944 and 1945, alongside Suiraijin and other Seiryūsha-exhibited paintings, and it has been read both as a sincere meditation on civilian loss and as a continuation of the wartime visual rhetoric in which official cultural policy enlisted senior nihonga painters. The Ryūshi Memorial Museum, founded by the artist on his studio site in 1963 and now operated by Ōta Ward, holds the picture as part of the central collection devoted to his work.