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Kikujiro Fukushima’s life in photography took off when he promised to avenge the Hiroshima bombing. It was 1952, and Mr. Fukushima — a watchmaker, volunteer social worker and photographer — met Sugimatsu Nakamura, a 43-year-old fisherman, who was gravely ill from the atomic bomb’s effects.

“For the first two years I was too timid to photograph him,” Mr. Fukushima told me a few weeks ago. “But one day, he got on his knees, crying, and begged me.”

“Fukushima, can you please take revenge on the atomic bomb?”

“Yes, but how?”

“Take pictures of my pain and let the world know how terrible it is.”

Mr. Nakamura was not only angry about the bombing, but also with the Japanese government, which refused to provide proper care for its victims. Mr. Fukushima understood this well — he had been in the Japanese military, stationed in Hiroshima until one week before the bombing, when he was transferred to prepare for a suicide mission. Most of his comrades who stayed behind were killed.

Mr. Nakamura died in 1967, but the documentary filmmaker Saburo Hasegawa believes that the vow Mr. Fukushima made to the ailing fisherman guided his subsequent career, in which he photographed individuals fighting social injustice. During the social upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Fukushima photographed student and feminist movements, antiwar protests and industrial pollution. He even infiltrated Japan’s Self-Defense Forces by telling the head of public affairs that he would gladly give it free pictures if it gave him access.

He had other plans.

“If the government or corporations knowingly deceived the public by breaking the law, it’s O.K. for photographers to break the law in order to uncover the truth they are hiding,” Mr. Fukushima explained in “Japan Lies,” the documentary Mr. Hasegawa made about him.

For three years, he photographed the Navy, Army and military academy, giving them photographs to use for publicity. All the while, he was photographing military secrets, like machine guns and missiles made inside factories. Without permission, he published the exposé, “A Farewell to Arms,” in a magazine. Soon after its publication, he was punched and kicked by a stranger who was lurking outside his house in Tokyo. A few weeks later, another stranger slashed his face. An arsonist torched his house while he was away, but his daughter Noriko carried his negatives to safety.

This was not the first time Mr. Fukushima’s photography took a personal toll. The decade he spent photographing Mr. Nakamura overwhelmed him and led to a nervous breakdown that put him in an asylum for three months. In 1960, he divorced his wife and moved to Tokyo to become a professional photojournalist.

Photographer Unknown Kikujiro Fukushima, the 20-year-old imperialist. He said that when he was young, he and his classmates were led to believe that killing as many enemies and dying for the emperor was the highest honor.

He worked mostly on personal projects, telling me that he was never a good photographer on assignment.

“Professional photographers go to newsy events, take beautiful pictures, publish nice spreads in magazines and move on,” he said. “I was very slow and shy. But once I throw myself into something, nobody could get me out of it. I simply get deeper and deeper. As a result, I ended up with the pictures nobody has.”

But when the Japanese economy prospered in 1980s and people willed themselves to forget the hard times of the postwar years, Mr. Fukushima’s politically charged photographs fell out of fashion. Instead, he designed jewelry to pay the bills. This was not too far from his roots: after the war — then married and with three children — he supported his family as a watchmaker. That was how he ended up in Hiroshima, which he visited several times a month to buy parts.

He first photographed the city’s ruins in 1946, after reading a newspaper article about how grass had begun to grow on the spot where the bomb was dropped. While also working as a volunteer social worker, he photographed orphans, widows and the elderly who were left alone after the bombing, giving the pictures to local authorities so they could raise money to help them.

Decades later, as an out-of-favor photojournalist, he left both photography and Tokyo. Disillusioned by the excess of materialism in Tokyo, he moved to Katashima, a desert island in Yamaguchi, in 1982, to live like Thoreau. I asked him why he chose the desert island.

“I didn’t have money,” he said. “So I decided to go to a place with no stores.”

He lived there for three years, then moved to a nearby island, where he spent another 15 years.

But his personal fate once again crossed paths with that of the nation when, in 1987, he learned he had stomach cancer. While recovering, the coverage of Emperor Hirohito’s deteriorating health dominated the news. Mr. Fukushima had supported the empire during the war, brainwashed to sacrifice his life for the emperor. He believed that many of his classmates were forced to die for the same cause.

Hiroyuki Ito Kikujiro Fukushima in Yanai, Yamaguchi, Japan. Dec. 2, 2013.

Convinced that the emperor was never held accountable for the horrors of the war, Mr. Fukushima mounted a retrospective exhibition called “The Emperor’s Responsibility” that was highly critical of Hirohito’s role in World War II.

The exhibition was successful, but he received death threats. As an act of defiance — or caution — he made his own coffin out of cheap plywood.

Now 92, Mr. Fukushima lives alone in an apartment in Yanai with his dog Roku. He does his own grocery shopping and cooks three meals a day. He refuses to receive a national pension, saying he can’t accept money from the enemy he has been fighting. He doesn’t take money from his children. Instead, he ekes out a living writing for magazines.

Feeling that the official history of postwar Japan has been whitewashed, he penned his own account. The third volume of his autobiography, “Postwar Japan Nobody Photographed,” was published early in 2013.

He continues to photograph residents of Iwaishima, a small fishing island in Yamaguchi, who have been protesting against a proposed nuclear plant for three decades. He traveled to Fukushima in September 2011 to photograph the nuclear crisis, six months after the earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc.

Keenly aware that he is probably the only journalist who has witnessed both the aftermath of Hiroshima and Fukushima, he is writing a book called “From Hiroshima to Fukushima.”

It has not been easy.

“Both are nuclear crises but different kinds,” he said. “Hiroshima’s crisis was caused by the bomb dropped by the enemy during the war. Fukushima’s crisis, though initially triggered by the earthquake and tsunami, was not really natural. It was caused by Japan’s nuclear industry whose interests more lie in their financial gain rather than the safety of the public. In Hiroshima, I photographed people who were dying. In Fukushima, it looked normal but nobody knows what is going to happen in long term. I didn’t know where to begin.”

He closely follows current events and asked me what I thought of a proposed secrecy law that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is trying to pass.

I went blank.

“What’s that?” I replied.

He looked the other way and murmured, “Read the paper, Hiro.”

Before I said goodbye, I asked him what he wanted to photograph next.

He looked me in the eye.

“Are you asking the 92-year-old grandfather to keep fighting? That’s impossible,” he said. “While I was in Fukushima, I couldn’t walk for long, I fell and couldn’t stand up by myself. How can I photograph with such a frail body?”

But without missing a beat he asked me a final question.

“By the way, do you happen to know a good tiny point-and-shoot camera?”