Yōsuke Yamahata

Who was Yōsuke Yamahata?

Yōsuke Yamahata was a Japanese photographer best known for extensively photographing Nagasaki the day after it was bombed.

Yamahata was born in Singapore; his father, Shōgyoku Yamahata had a job there related to photography. He went to Tokyo in 1925 and eventually started at Hosei University but dropped out in 1936 to work in G. T. Sun, a photographic company run by his father. From 1940, Yamahata worked as a military photographer in China and elsewhere in Asia outside Japan; he returned to Japan in 1942.

On August 10, 1945, a day after the Nagasaki bombing, Yamahata began to photograph the devastation, still working as a military photographer. Over a period of about twelve hours he took around a hundred exposures; by late afternoon, he had taken his final photographs near a first aid station north of the city. In a single day, he had completed the only extensive photographic record of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. These photographs appeared swiftly, for example in the August 21 issue of Mainichi Shinbun.