A Note from the Author
Keiji Nakazawa
The atomic bomb exploded 600 meters above my hometown of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m. I was a little over a kilometer away from the epicenter, standing at the back gate of Kanzaki Primary School, when I was hit by a terrible blast of wind and searing heat. I was six years old. I owe my life to the school’s concrete wall. If I hadn’t been standing in its shadow, I would have been burned to death instantly by the 5,000-degree heat flash. Instead, I found myself in a living hell, the details of which remain etched in my brain as if it happened yesterday.
My mother, Kimiyo, was eight months pregnant. She was on the second floor balcony of our house, had just finished hanging up the wash to dry, and was turning to go back inside when the bomb exploded. The blast blew the entire balcony, with my mother on it, into the alley behind our house. Miraculously, my mother survived without a scratch.
The blast blew our house flat. The second floor collapsed onto the first, trapping my father, my sister Eiko, and my brother Susumu under it. My brother had been sitting in the front doorway, playing with a toy ship. His head was caught under the rafter over the doorway. He frantically kicked his legs and cried out for my mother. My father, trapped inside the house, begged my mother to do something. My sister had been crushed by a rafter and killed instantly.
My mother frantically tried to lift the rafters off them, but she wasn’t strong enough to do it by herself. She begged passersby to stop and help, but nobody would. In that atomic hell, people could only think of their own survival; they had no time for anyone else. My mother tried everything she could, but to no avail. Finally, in despair, she sat down in the doorway, clutching my crying brother and helplessly pushing at the rafter that was crushing him.
The fires that followed the blast soon reached our house. It was quickly enveloped in flame. My brother yelled that he was burning; my father kept begging my mother to get some help. My mother, half-mad with grief and desperation, sobbed that she would stay and die with them. But our nextdoor neighbor found my mother just in time and dragged her away.
For the rest of her days, my mother never forgot the sound of the voices of her husband and son, crying out for her to save them. The shock sent my mother into labor, and she gave birth to a daughter by the side of the road that day. She named the baby Tomoko. But Tomoko died only four months later – perhaps from malnutrition, perhaps from radiation sickness, we didn’t know.
After escaping the flames near the school, I found my mother there by the roadside with her newborn baby. Together we sat and watched the scenes of hell unfolding around us.
My father had been a painter of lacquer work and traditional- style Japanese painting. He was also a member of an anti-war theater group that performed plays like Gorky’s “The Lower Depths.” Eventually the thought police arrested the entire troupe and put them in the Hiroshima Prefectural Prison. My father was held there for a year and a half. Even when I was a young child, my father constantly told me that Japan had been stupid and reckless to start the war.
Thanks, no doubt, to my father’s influence, I enjoyed drawing from an early age. After the war I began reading Osamu Tezuka’s comic magazine Shin-Takarajima (New Treasure Island); that had a huge impact on me. I began slavishly copying Tezuka’s drawings and turned into a manga maniac. Hiroshima was an empty, burnt-out wasteland and we went hungry every day, but when I drew comics, I was happy and forgot everything else. I vowed early on to become a professional cartoonist when I grew up.
In 1961 I pursued my dream by moving to Tokyo. A year later I published my first cartoon serial in the manga monthly Shonen Gaho (Boys’ Pictorial). From then on I was a full-time cartoonist.
In 1966, after seven years of illness, my mother died in the A- Bomb Victims Hospital in Hiroshima. When I went to the crematorium to collect her ashes, I was shocked. There were no bones left in my mother’s ashes, as there normally are after a cremation. Radioactive cesium from the bomb had eaten away at her bones to the point that they disintegrated. The bomb had even deprived me of my mother’s bones. I was overcome with rage. I vowed that I would never forgive the Japanese militarists who started the war, nor the Americans who had so casually dropped the bomb on us.
I began drawing comics about the A-bomb as a way to avenge my mother. I vented my anger through a “Black” series of six manga published in an adult manga magazine, starting with Kuroi Ame ni Utarete (Struck by Black Rain). Then I moved to Shukan Shonen Jump (Weekly Boys’ Jump), where I began a series of works about the war and the A-bomb starting with Aru Hi Totsuzen ni (One Day, Suddenly).
When the monthly edition of Jump launched a series of autobiographical works by its cartoonists, I was asked to lead off with my own story. My 45-page manga autobiography was titled Ore wa Mita (I Saw It). My editor at Jump, Tadasu Nagano, commenting that I must have more to say that wouldn’t fit in 45 pages, urged me to draw a longer series based on my personal experiences. I gratefully began the series right away. That was in 1972.
I named my new story Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). The young protagonist’s name, Gen, has several meanings in Japanese. It can mean the “root” or “origin” of something, but also “elemental” in the sense of an atomic element, as well as a “source” of vitality and happiness. I envisioned Gen as barefoot, standing firmly atop the burnt-out rubble of Hiroshima, raising his voice against war and nuclear weapons. Gen is my alter ego, and his family is just like my own. The episodes in Barefoot Gen are all based on what really happened to me or to other people in Hiroshima.
Human beings are foolish. Thanks to bigotry, religious fanaticism, and the greed of those who traffic in war, the Earth is never at peace, and the specter of nuclear war is never far away. I hope that Gen’s story conveys to its readers the preciousness of peace and the courage we need to live strongly, yet peacefully. In Barefoot Gen, wheat appears as a symbol of that strength and courage. Wheat pushes its shoots up through the winter frost, only to be trampled again and again. But the trampled wheat sends strong roots into the earth and grows straight and tall. And one day, that wheat bears fruit.
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