Born in Tokyo into a middle-class family, Akihiko Okamura (1929-1985) was 16 when Japan was annihilated in 1945 by the Tokyo bombings, the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the arrival of General MacArthur's troops. The family home in Tokyo was then destroyed. He began training in medicine, but abandoned it to devote himself to photography. He joined the editorial staff of New Weekly in 1961, documenting international conflicts. Okamura quickly made a name for himself as an important war photographer, notably in Vietnam in the 1960s. Traumatized by the bombings of the Second World War, the photographer has always been guided by his desire to tell the story of conflict and denounce human rights violations. Okamura covered several war zones in the Dominican Republic, Northern Ireland, Nigeria (Biafra War) and Ethiopia. He moved to Ireland with his family in 1969, where he remained until his death in 1985.

His oeuvre was the subject of a first posthumous monographic exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2014, almost thirty years after his death. The publication Les souvenirs des autres and the eponymous exhibition at the Photo Museum Ireland in Dublin, bring to light for the first time internationally his long-term work on Ireland and The Troubles years.