On the morning of 6 August 1945, one hour before the Enola Gay – the aircraft carrying the atomic bomb – was due to fly over Hiroshima, Officer Claude Eatherly flew over the city to check the weather conditions. In other cities, thousands of people got saved because it was raining that day.

On the night of 8–9 July 1999, my father and my brother died in a car accident.

On 11 March 2011, a terrible earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck the Miyagi and Iwate districts of Japan, causing nearly 25,000 deaths and destroying 475,000 homes.

The starting point of this project is a pack of letters that I found at the end of 2012. Dating from 1999, these letters are the correspondence between my teenage brother and his Japanese girlfriend, Kaori.
Kaori continued writing and sending photos and postcards for months after the accident.
Searching for Kaori led me to Fukushima and the tsunami area, working as a pretext to explore stories of loss and reconstruction across Japan.

“The first day of good weather” was the order issued by US President Truman to drop the bomb on Japan.