Meet Keiji Nakazawa

Recording horrible events effectively sometimes takes personal experience and Keiji Nakazawa, the author of Barefoot Gen, witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb first hand. You can say Gen is an offshoot of Nakazawa, who at six years old lost most of his family to chaos and death that struck Japan.

After the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, Nakazawa went to Tokyo to become a cartoonist. His works set of manga was produced for Shonen Gaho, Shonen King, and Bokura. In 1966, Nakazawa dug deep into his memories of Hiroshima and created two biographical works; Kuroi Ame ni Utarete (Struck by Black Rain) and the autobiographical Ore wa Mita ('I Saw It'). Barefoot Gen, produced in 1972, was the first manga to be translated into a Western language. When the English translation debuted, there were many complaints about the graphic depictions of victims after the bomb's explosion. The comic was never meant for shock value, for it was a searing message against militarism and the war which helped bring the destruction of Hiroshima.

In an interview with The Comics Journal, Nakazawa recounts his involvement with the comics based on his experience:

"Since coming to Tokyo, I hadn't said a word about being an A-bomb survivor to anyone. People in Tokyo looked at you very strangely if you talked about it, so I learned to keep quiet. There was still an irrational fear among many Japanese that you could "catch" radiation sickness from A-bomb victims. There were plenty of people like that, even in a big city like Tokyo."

"I was enraged that the bomb had taken even my mother's bones. All the way on the train back to Tokyo, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I realized I'd never thought seriously about the bomb, the war and why it happened. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was that the Japanese had not confronted these issues at all. They hadn't accepted their own responsibility for the war. I decided from then on, I'd write about the bomb and the war, and pin the blame where it belonged. Within a week after getting back to Tokyo, I wrote my first work about the bomb, Kuroi Ame ni Utarete [Struck by Black Rain]. It's about young people in postwar Hiroshima getting involved in the black market for weapons. The main character is an A-bomb survivor whose hatred drives him to kill an American black marketeer. He asks the Americans, 'Who are you to talk about justice when you massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in the firebombing of Tokyo? Was that what you call justice?'"

The editors who read Struck by Black Rain were very moved by it and told me to write more. I wound up writing five books in my "Black" series -- Black River, Black Silence and so on. Black Rain was published in serial form in Manga Punch, an "adult" manga magazine by a small publisher, Hobunsha. The big publishers turned it down. They said it was too radical for them, too political.

I recall conversations with my class that Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors were not given adequate treatment in their own country. They were not even able to find jobs or apply for health insurance! Japan has become more democratic in recent years but the country is still ashamed of its own militaristic past. Japan should be thankful that some people remember the atomic bomb and recount it in any way they can. Nakazawa's bitterness towards Japanese militarism is apparent in Gen and sometimes knowing the painful truth of people graphically dying from radiation sickness with skin falling off and maggots feasting on dead flesh on living people is horrible but necessary.

I have probably sounded preachy by denouncing nuclear weapons and policies in the blog so far but I will say this: we must acknowledge the past so we do not repeat it.

- Kristopher