5 Dinero y crédito
2 Restricciones financieras en las regiones de la zona del euro
Keiji Nakazawa; pub Shueisha (Jp), Last Gasp of San Francisco (US, UK, Aus);
ser Weekly Shōnen Jump (1973–74); vols 10
K
eiji Nakazawa was only six years old when the US dropped a nuclear bomb on his hometown of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, leaving his father, older sister and younger brother among the eighty thousand dead and he, his mother and infant sister to fend for themselves. The sister died several weeks later, but his mother lived until 1966, her body slowly ravaged by the effects of radiation to the point where no bone fragments were left in her cremated remains.While Nakazawa had largely repressed his memories of the bombing, the frustration and anger over seeing his mother’s remains spurred him to
write a series of anti-war novels and manga based on his experience. In 1972, when Shueisha’s Monthly Shōnen
Jump published his 45-page autobio-
graphical manga Ore wa Mita (I Saw It), editor Tadasu Nagano was so impressed he encouraged Nakazawa to write an expanded version for serialization: the semi-autobiographical Barefoot Gen.
Following Barefoot Gen proved to be tricky during its initial serialization. Nagano edited the series in Shueisha’s
Weekly Shōnen Jump for a year and a
half before leaving the post, then the new editor wanted to take the magazine in a different direction and promptly cancelled the series. It would take eight
years and three different magazines – two of which went out of business – for
Barefoot Gen to complete its run.
Despite these setbacks, a moving story would emerge, one that vividly depicted the horror inflicted on the Japanese and the struggles of coming of age in the aftermath of war. To the Japanese, it was an eye-opening account of how bombing victims were marginalized in society, and copies of the series are now housed in primary and middle-school libraries across Japan. To the rest of the world, including Japan’s wartime enemies, the translated series revealed the impact of the war on Japanese civilian life.
Lead character Gen Nakaoka is a year older than Nakazawa was in 1945, but otherwise Gen’s family reflects Nakazawa’s, even down to Gen’s father Daikichi being an outspoken critic of the war who believes Japan should strive for peace with the Allied powers. It is pointless, he argues, for people to sacrifice themselves for a nation run by a military controlled by the wealthy, a view that was at odds with the prevailing feeling at the time.
As the proverb goes, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down”, and so Gen’s father, and by extension the entire Nakaoka family, gets hammered down with extreme prejudice by their neigh- bours and the authorities alike. But the family’s faith and support of one another keeps them going. Even when older brother Koji goes against his father’s wishes and enlists in the Imperial Army,
as the train is pulling away from the station, Daikichi shows up to shout his enthusiastic encouragement of his son. Family ties end up trumping politics every time.
Looming in the background during this first volume or so of the manga is an inexorable sense of impending disaster: we know what will happen on 6 August. Nakazawa juxtaposes images of the approaching US bomber Enola Gay with scenes of the Nakaoka family going about their daily life, and the actual bombing sequence happens over a span of just four pages, a single flash in time represented by the blinding flash Gen sees after the Enola Gay drops its load.
The bomb’s impact may last only an instant in Nakazawa’s narrative, but its aftereffects linger through the rest of the series. The initial impact is depicted with flesh melting off bodies, corpses littering the streets and buildings reduced to rubble. Then the horror becomes personal when Gen and his mother find the rest of their family trapped under their house. They try to save them, but in the end can only watch helplessly as fire sweeps through the wreckage of the building.
Despite the suffering of the survivors, they’re still subject to the same old preju- dices. Gen and his mother head inland with his newborn baby sister, but the first family they stay with harbours a grudge against them for sucking up already limited resources. And so Gen is forced to grow up before his time in a
Japan that is obsessed first with war, then with survival and the shame of defeat. Through it all, though, there remains a sense of hope, mostly down to Gen’s determination in the face of whatever insults and prejudices are thrown his way.
An account of the story through the eyes of an adult would be gruelling enough to
read. The perspective of a child – and one who sees most of his family die before his eyes, at that – makes for a devastating read, and one that’s more easily identifiable for younger readers. Yet Nakazawa’s message is also one of dogged determination, of persevering and surviving through the hard times to ensure the mistakes of the past are never repeated.