“Let’s enjoy English!” right next to a big picture of a mushroom cloud. Strange? I thought so. But here in Japan, the A-bomb and its history is not something that they shy away from. They often use it for subject matter in English classes, as well as other subjects. Recently, my third year (eighth grade) students took a field trip to Hiroshima to learn about the catastrophe, and they even talked with survivors of the bomb.
I wanted to read something about the atomic attacks from a Japanese perspective (and improve my Japanese reading ability at the same time) so I borrowed a book that I found at my school. It is called はだしのげんはピカドンを忘れない (Hadashi no Gen wa Pikadon wo Wasurenai) or Barefoot Gen Will Not Forget the Atom Bomb.
It's a widely known book and all of my students are impressed that I am reading it. It is quite a grapic graphic novel (yes there are two “graphic”s there; one for “picture” and the other for “gruesome”). Some of the students shudder when they see it.
I tend to have a bit of a sick sense of humor, and I am kind of a jerk so I thought I was pretty funny when I drew this on the cover of my high school Japanese class folder:
And yes, at the top of the drawing it says, “Land of the Rising Sun”. Now that I have friends from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is still funny, but in a much quieter, shameful way. The illustrations in the book that I am reading are really quite similar in the quality of the detail, but they come from someone that actually saw what happened in Hiroshima that fateful day, and they spare no expense at detail:
When this book came out in the 70s it was very sensational because there weren't very many books that included such violent, and disturbing images.
Some of the students shudder when they see that I am reading it, and some of the female students have told me that they couldn't finish it.
It has been made into animated movies and is part of a much larger series of books, based upon the authors experience on the day of and after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima when he was six years old.
The full story is much better than just the images alone, and it draws some interesting parallels to the modern day USA. Gen’s father is very anti-war, and is very critical of Japan for going so far. He is furious over the attack on Pearl Harbor, the blind allegiance to the emperor and he tells his family that “Japan is definitely going to loose!” Gen’s father is a man of many hobbies and besides his job as a geta (wooden sandals) painter; he is also an actor in an acting guild. The interesting parallel is that the local police send officers to infiltrate the acting guild because the actors are hosting plays that are quite serious, dark and anti-establishment in nature (such as Gorky's "The Lower Depths"). Gen’s father and every one else in the acting guild are all arrested (and subsequently tortured) for being unpatriotic. The same kind of garbage happens today in the USA, and I guess we should just assume that it happens everywhere, anytime there is a war. Strange how somethings always repeat themselves…
The biggest irony in the story is that this family, that is very anti-imperialist, anti-war and is at odds with Japan's military conquest, suffers just as hard as everyone else in the city, civilian and military alike. Hopefully literature and art like this can help to prevent such a nasty end from happening ever again by reminding the world of its horrors.
The story is getting intense and I will let you know how it turns out. I'm just now to the part where a plane called the “Enola Gay” takes off…
Ta ta,
Erich von Meatleg
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