BAREFOOT GEN 47
one’s beliefs, repeatedly symbolized by the image of wheat that springs back and keeps
growing no matter how many times it has been trampled. Readers worldwide were
able to experience the terror of Hiroshima from a powerful new perspective thanks
to this comic. Since the historical events are mostly viewed from the perspective of
the innocent child, Gen, the reader is quickly swept up in his unfair fate. Barefoot Gen
was not the fi rst antiwar comic, or the fi rst comic about the atomic bomb, but at the
time Nakazawa started with Hadashi no Gen , survivors of the A-bomb were still often
looked upon with distaste and discriminated against in Japanese society. Another im-
portant factor is that this was the fi rst manga to be introduced as pedagogical material
in Japanese schools at a time when manga were still looking for wider recognition.
About 2,700 pages tell the story of Gen from April 1945 until August 1953. Th e fi rst
250 pages describe how diffi cult life was in Hiroshima for a peculiar family with a
father protesting against the war. Th ough the family undergoes several hardships (not
only hunger, but also harassment by people in charge), their real ordeal commences
after the A-bomb explodes in the center of the city. Hiroshima turns into a night-
marish post-apocalyptic inferno, with thousands of burned corpses piled in streets
populated by wounded people covered with glass shards or dragging their own melted
skin. In the comic, the father, the sister, and the youngest brother are buried under
the rubble of their house, then burned alive in front of the helpless mother and Gen,
though in reality, as shown in I Saw It , Nakazawa was not present at a similar scene
involving his own family. On top of that, Gen’s mother goes into labor but the baby
dies a few months later. Gen and his mother try to survive but few people are help-
ful. Nakazawa depicts a cruel survival of the fi ttest, whereby violence is almost always
present, even among young children. Th e seven-year-old Gen learns to grow up very
fast. Th ough the fi rst two volumes are much more impressive than the short version, in
the long run Barefoot Gen becomes a quite traditional shonen manga about resource-
ful kids in diffi cult circumstances (coping with the black market and yakuza), and it
diverges more from the real events of Nakazawa’s experience. Th e fi ctional cycle ends in
August 1953, when the 14-year-old Gen leaves Hiroshima for Tokyo to study, though,
in reality, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo in 1961 to try his luck as a manga artist. Th e
author explains in an interview with Th e Comics Journal that he considers the series
unfi nished, but that he has no plans to produce new episodes.
As an artist Nakazawa has serious limitations (quite heavy line work, a limited range
of standard facial and corporal expressions), but he works nevertheless in one of the
traditional shonen manga styles of that period—one can note for instance the infl uence
of Tezuka ’s drawing style. For Western readers, not being used to such manga styles
and codes, the characters may seem to overact continuously. In spite of this cartoony
and simplistic drawing style, the persistent reader is quickly drawn into the story and
overwhelmed by an avalanche of heartbreaking scenes.
Selected Bibliography: Berndt, Jaqueline, and Steffi Richter, eds. Reading Manga:
Local and Global Perceptions of Japanese Comics (Mitteldeutsche Studien zu Ostasien 11).
