Comic fallout from the Hiroshima Bomb

Gen The Chicken Foot: A Picture Story about Hiroshima (Hadashi no Gen) By Keiji Nakazawa Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1996 288 pages

JAKARTA (JP): Tezuka, the Japanese illustrator, said once that comics are one of the forms most easily absorbed by the human intellect.

Hadashi no Gen -- the Indonesian version reads Gen the Chicken Foot, in English Keiji Barefoot Gen: a Cartoon Story of Hiroshima -- is a story depicting the quasi-life of the artist Keiji Nakazawa before and after the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was the first Japanese comic translated and published in Europe and distributed among school children. In Japan, it was published in 1972-1973 and ran as a serial story in Shukan Shonen Jampu, the largest cartoon weekly in the country. It was widely praised by parents, teachers, and critics. It was also made into a motion picture launched in North America.

The dire effects of war, and the impact of an atomic bomb, are well known. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, are not easily forgotten. But even if we know how destructive war can be or what the effects of an atomic bomb are, our emotions may be unable to cope with the terrible truth itself.

Drawing a picture of people facing an inhuman situation as World War II draws to a close, Gen captures precisely such a moment.

The cartoon draws the readers' attention to the government's hypocrisy, treachery, and ignorance, and to the well-to-do's sham patriotism and militant posturing. People surrender their harvests to the rich and the government; the male population is recruited by force; schools become propaganda centers.

"Lessons were frequently canceled, so students could work in the fields, in factories, and be available for all sorts of army labor. This was in addition to military exercises, which formed an important part of the school curriculum at the time. Students were subjected to physical punishment, justified as "affectionate punishment" to mold them into proper Japanese," noted Susumu Ishitani, a member of the Association of Reconciled Japanese, and Inner Rejection of Military Taxes.

The main focus of the comic is on Gen's family. It is portrayed as one of the few families opposing the war, not succumbing to cheap government and military propaganda. However, the end is painful. Gen's father is labeled a traitor, detained and tortured by the police. Gen, his mother and the rest of his family are chased out of their house by their neighbors, who, under the influence of propaganda, believe that the war will lead Japan into an era of glory.

The writer, who experienced these horrors himself, gives a most touching account of the events.

The culmination of the story is when Gen and his mother witness, helplessly, his father and two other family members hit by the deadly blast of radiation.

What do Americans think of the comic?

Paula J. Paul, President of the Philadelphia Education Organization for Social Responsibility and member of the board of the National Education Organization for Social Responsibility, said in her foreword to the English edition that "Gen the Chicken Foot offers Americans a rare opportunity to learn of the enemy's day-to-day life during World War II.

David H. Albert, publisher of the English edition stressed that "we should not forget the thousands like Gen and his family during the war in Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, and in the USA. There are such people at the moment, all of them heroes, although one never reads about them in history books, nor in our newspapers."

One sentence of the Gen story reads "if the bomb had been dropped during the first air raid warning of the attack, many people would have survived the horror. But, as they believed that enemy planes had left the scene, they felt safe and emerged from their shelters."

Such regrets swell Japanese hearts as they commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945.

-- A. Ariobimo Nusantara