As 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, the memories of people who experienced the war have been fading away. Amid such a situation, a project is underway to utilize old pictures and the latest technologies to bring some of those memories back.
Anju Niwata, 18, a student at the University of Tokyo, joined a school activity to record the testimonies of hibakusha, or atomic bomb victims, when she was a first-year high school student in Hiroshima. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, built near the epicenter of the explosion, used to be a downtown area where about 4,400 people lived. She met a man who had lived in the area and lost all his family members in the atomic bombing. She learned that he carefully kept a black-and-white photo of his family.
"If the black-and-white photo is turned into a color photo, he might feel closer to his family," Niwata thought after she joined a lecture on digital archives at her high school just after the activity. The lecturer was University of Tokyo Prof. Hidenori Watanabe, 45, then an associate professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University.
Specializing in information design, Watanabe focuses on new digital technologies such as the internet and social media. In cooperation with local people, he has created digital archives in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa and other places to deliver the testimonies of war victims and war photos to a wide range of people. However, Watanabe recalled, "I noticed that valuable wartime photos on the archives are not seen by many people, and I guessed that was because they were black-and-white."
Since the 2010s, it has become possible to color skies, seas, faces and other content in black-and-white photos easily and make them look like color photos by utilizing artificial intelligence that has scanned and learned a large number of photos.
When a black-and-white photo colored by AI was posted on Twitter, the photo triggered a large reaction and got 100 million impressions over 2-1/2 years. "Black-and-white photos that were turned into color photos might make people realize that past events lead to today's life. As a result, many people can feel that the war is something related to themselves," Watanabe said.
Niwata learned the technology from Watanabe. In the course of her activity of listening to the testimonies of hibakusha in Hiroshima, she started to turn black-and-white photos the hibakusha still had into color photos and presenting them with the colorized versions. This was the start of the project called "Kioku no Kaito" (Unfreezing of memories), carried out jointly by Niwata and Watanabe.
The outcomes exceeded their expectations. People who saw color photos of their young selves from more than 70 years ago were delighted and recalled their memories one after another. A person whose dementia had made it difficult for them to converse with others saw a color photo and actively spoke of the memories of family members who were killed in the atomic bombing. Seeing a flower colored white, the person pointed out a mistake: "This flower should be a yellow dandelion."
"Elderly people who first talked about the sadness of losing families started to talk about happy memories with their families after they looked at the color photos. That was impressive," Niwata said.
"Coloring black-and-white photos helped generate dialogues. We don't know whether the color photos really show genuine colors, but we hope they would help create lots of opportunities to talk and think about war over generations," Watanabe said.
The project is now covering other areas than Hiroshima. The two have worked on colorizing black-and-white photos of Japanese cities during the Pacific War, overseas battlefields and other scenes. In July, they published a book on prewar and wartime people and events revived through AI-colorized photos, which contains 355 photos.
The book has recently brought about a new dialogue in Niwata's own family. She gave the book to her grandfather, who hails from Hiroshima Prefecture. Then, he began talking about his experience at age 5. "First, I saw a flash of light and then heard a huge noise. While I could only see the upper part due to mountains, I saw a dark mushroom cloud rise into the sky."
Niwata was surprised. "I heard my grandfather talk about his experience of the atomic bombing for the first time," she said.
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