Birds
When she was only four years old, while she and her family had run away from Tokyo to escape the Allied bombings, Junko encountered a decapitated hen at her uncle's hospital. The bird hung upside-down from the ceiling, its white feathers befouled with its own blood which was dripping into a bucket laid on the straw mat below. Created to fly, the Bird had come to this end. To Junko, the Bird represented all the horrors of war, and of fascism - of the repression of the individual and of the individual's need to be free.
For fifty years after that she had a horrible phobia of birds and could not even look at them. But then in 1991, she went into her studio and over a period of two months she created a series of 45 powerful works, showing the Bird rising above its torment, sitting first in a cathedral and then floating in clouds of air and gold. The phobia was gone - but the Bird remains one of Junko's recurring themes even today.