By Keiji Nakazawa (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-596-5
At the half-way point of Keiji Nakazawa’s ten volume masterpiece of anti-war, anti-greed polemic, the eternally resilient Gen Nakaoka is playing outside his ramshackle school when he runs afoul of a brittle, solitary girl who won’t let him see her face. It is December 1947 and much of the children’s school day consists of old fashioned rote learning and furtive brawling when the teacher isn’t looking. A grim and graphic recap is provided as the entire class is told to write an essay about their family…
This testament to determination and the human ability to endure continues with the return of the wayward orphan Ryuta, now a rising star of the local underworld. Delighted at the return of his “brother”, Gen is lured to a bar where he confronts Ryuta about his life of crime, and enjoys the fruits of thievery in the form of black market food and coffee. Here he meets another maimed bomb girl named Katsuko, whose desperate hunger for education was thwarted by intolerant teachers and her own shame. The mood is convivial when Gen promises to tutor her but swiftly changes when Ryuta’s brutal boss Masa shows up.
The gangster is in the middle of a turf war for control of the thriving rackets that have grown up in the demolished but still populous city. Although Ryuta and his fellow orphan’s believe themselves on a solid career path, they are unaware that Masa only wants them as disposable cannon fodder for the battle he knows is coming…
The daily grind continues with Gen always a strident outsider whose observations and protests are either embarrassing or laughable to those around him. However when the teacher announces that the Emperor intends to “honor” the city with a visit the boy’s resentment at what the militarists caused and indignation at the survivors fawning gratitude boils over.
Meanwhile older brother Koji becomes a victim of the city’s cash shortage. After months of working he learns his employer cannot and will never pay him. Once more the spectre of starvation confronts the Nakaokas, but Gen is more troubled by bad dreams. On awakening he finds his premonition to be true. Ryuta has been involved in another shooting…
On December 7th 1947, six years to the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Emperor ShÅwa (Hirohito to we westerners) toured the bomb craters and building sites of Hiroshima, safe within a luxurious automobile, whilst hundreds of cold, starving citizens clad in threadbare rags waved handmade flags and saluted. Furious at their insensate stupidity Gen could only look incredulously on whilst sneaking Ryuta and his surviving child gangsters into his family’s shanty shack.
En route they see an old man being kicked out of his home by his own family, but the ever helpful boy is baffled by the frail man’s seeming indifference to the situation. The delay causes them to overhear Mrs Nakaoka talking to a neighbour. Made aware of just how ill she is and how much strain three more mouths to feed will cause, Ryuta, Katsuko and little Musubi decide to strike out on their own.
Once more Gen’s spirit overcomes all obstacles. He convinces the three to set up their own home in hiding, and when they find the evicted old man still sitting in the road where they left him Gen talks him into joining them. The un-named gentleman was thrown out because he had “A Bomb Slackers Disease” (an enervating malaise as much traumatic shock and survivor’s guilt syndrome as acute long-term radiation poisoning, which manifested as a lack of energy and concentration in the early stages). Finding an abandoned Army Field Hospital, they cannibalise the structure to build a small house. The orphans have never been happier, but when Katsuko goes to buy some food to celebrate she is captured by Masa’s thugs. The Big Boss wants his cannon-fodder back…
Despite a brutal beating she refuses to talk. When Masa throws her out the distraught innocent is unaware that they are following her. As the gangsters burst into the ramshackle sanctuary, Gen leaps to defend his friends, suffering the worst beating of his terrible, violent life. To save him Ryuta once more resorts to his gun, shooting a thug and even wounding Masa himself.
Joyous in their new-found freedom, young and old celebrate the dawn of a New Year in the most lavish manner possible, but at school later that day Gen once more invites trouble by refusing to bow and bless the Emperor. However, despite the teacher’s wrath, the boy is beginning to win the admiration of some of his fellow students…
Certain elements of military Japan were re-establishing themselves as the city began to rebuild, attempting to whitewash their pasts for the New Japan. When Denjiro Samejima, head of the Merchants Association, runs for political office claiming he always opposed the war and was a “soldier for Peace”, Gen boils over at the arrant hypocrisy. He bursts into a public meeting to confront him reminding everybody that the crafty merchant and Black Marketeer had denounced Gen’s father – a genuine antiwar dissident – and even led the hate-campaign that tortured the entire family in the days before The Bomb. His brief moment of triumph is ended when Akira finds him: their mother has collapsed…
In occupied Japan the news media was absolutely forbidden from discussing or reporting the effects of Atom Bombs. 300,000 terrified and bewildered survivors had no idea what was happening to their bodies – or that they were not unique nor even isolated cases…
The doctor they beg to examine their mother tells the boys that the only hope is the American’s research agency ABCC – Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission – and he refers her to their care over the belligerent Gen’s strident objections. But the foreigners can do nothing to help and she returns home. With money in such short supply Koji leaves for distant Kyushu to work in the coal mines. Leaving his family for the second time he swears to send them all he earns.
Whilst looking for work Gen saves another girl from bullies, but this time occupation not immolation has provoked the citizens’ ire. Even seeking employment is increasingly risky as the police now have orders to round up street children and lock them in state orphanages. Chie has a father, and when he carries the girl home Gen is gratefully given his first taste of alcohol – which, like everything, he overdoes to the point of collapse.
He also discovers his suspicions about the ABCC were totally justified.
Chie’s father Seikichi Hirokawa is a “vulture”, employed by the Americans to buy the bodies of recently deceased Japanese for scientists to examine. Traumatised and plagued with guilt he can only feed his family by hounding the bereaved and dishonouring the dead. He reveals that the bomb’s makers are hungry for information on the aftereffects and don’t see the victims as human; dissecting the bodies, stealing organs and always hungry for more data…
The all-pervasive teams they send into schools to regularly examine the children have a hidden agenda and are aided by the local Japanese doctors who are all bribed to refer everybody they can to the Agency. For each referral they are rewarded with fancy American drugs – which they sell for profit to the black market. Nobody is treated or cured; they are just tested and catalogued. Kimie Nakaoka was just another lab rat and paycheck to the greedy physician and Gen’s inevitable remonstrance with the quack is at once uniquely disturbing and cathartically emphatic.
To escape the orphan-hunters Ryuta and his pal’s have been adopted by the old man they called “Gramps” but his health is fading. Originally a journalist he has determined his last act will be to publish a book telling the truth about the Atom Bombing of Hiroshima. Even though they know no publisher will risk taking it and Americans will try to suppress it the children swear his book will be released…
The broad cartoon style of Keiji Nakazawa’s art has often been the subject of heated discussion; the Disney-esque, simplified rendering felt by some to be at odds with the subject matter, and perhaps diluting the impact of the message. I’d like to categorically refute that.
Mister Nakazawa’s style springs from his earliest influence, Osamu Tezuka, the Father of Animé and God of Manga who began his career in 1946 and whose works – Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island), Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) and literally hundreds of others – eased some of the grim realities of being a bomb survivor, providing escape, hope and even a career path to the young boy.
As such the clear line, solid black forms and abstracted visual motifs act as tolerable symbols for much of the horror in this parable. The art defuses, not dilutes, the terrible facts and scenes of the tragedy and its aftermath. The reader has to be brought through the tale to receive the message and for that purpose the drawings are accurate, simplified and effective. The intent is not to repel (and to be honest as they are they’re still pretty hard to take) but to inform, to warn.
So now you’ve been warned, buy this series. Better yet, agitate your local library to get a few sets in as well. Barefoot Gen is a world classic and should be available to absolutely everyone…
© 2008 Keiji Nakazawa. All Rights Reserved.