Hiroshima Read online

  Hiroshima

  ASIAN VOICES

  A Subseries of Asia/Pacific/Perspectives

  Series Editor: Mark Selden

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  edited and translated by Herbert Batt, foreword by Tsering Shakya

  Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989

  by Philip J Cunningham

  Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan

  by Mikiso Hane

  Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery under the Japanese Military

  by Maria Rosa Henson, introduction by Yuki Tanaka

  Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey

  by Ienaga Saburo¯, translated and introduced by Richard H. Minear

  I’m Married to Your Company! Everyday Voices of Japanese Women

  by Masako Itoh, edited by Nobuko Adachi and James Stanlaw

  Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age

  by Mark McLelland

  Behind the Silence: Chinese Voices on Abortion

  by Nie Jing-Bao

  Rowing the Eternal Sea: The Life of a Minamata Fisherman

  by Oiwa Keibo, narrated by Ogata Masato, translated by Karen Colligan-Taylor

  The Scars of War: Tokyo during World War II, Writings of Takeyama Michio

  edited and translated by Richard H. Minear

  Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography

  by Vasant Moon, translated by Gail Omvedt, introduction by Eleanor Zelliot

  Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War

  by Tessa Morris-Suzuki

  Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen

  by Nakazawa Keiji, edited and translated by Richard H. Minear

  China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism

  by Judy Polumbaum

  Sweet and Sour: Life-Worlds of Taipei Women Entrepreneurs

  by Scott Simon

  Dear General MacArthur: Letters from the Japanese during the American Occupation

  by Sodei Rinjiro¯, edited by John Junkerman, translated by Shizue Matsuda, foreword by John W. Dower

  Unbroken Spirits: Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag

  by Suh Sung, translated by Jean Inglis, foreword by James Palais

  No Time for Dreams: Living in Burma under Military Rule

  by Carolyn Wakeman and San San Tin

  A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters

  by Sasha Su-Ling Welland

  Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia

  by Benny Widyono

  Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform

  by Ying Ruocheng and Claire Conceison

  For more books in this series, go to www.rowman.com/series

  Hiroshima

  The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen

  Nakazawa Keiji

  Edited and Translated by

  Richard H. Minear

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nakazawa, Keiji.

  [Hadashi no Gen jiden. English]

  Hiroshima : the autobiography of Barefoot Gen / Nakazawa Keiji ; edited and translated by Richard H. Minear.

  p. cm. — (Asian voices)

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-4422-0747-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0749-3 (electronic)

  1. Nakazawa, Keiji. 2. Cartoonists—Japan—Biography. 3. Comic books, strips, etc.—Japan—History. 4. Nakazawa, Keiji. Hadashi no Gen. 5. Nakazawa, Keiji—Childhood and youth. 6. Nakazawa, Keiji—Family. 7. Atomic bomb victims—Japan—Hiroshima-shi—Biography. 8. Hiroshima-shi (Japan)—History—Bombardment, 1945—Personal narratives. 9. Hiroshima-shi (Japan)—Biography. 10. Japan—Biography. I. Minear, Richard H. II. Title.

  NC1709.N26A2 2010

  741.5'952—dc22

  [B]

  2010020806

  ` ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Editor’s Introduction

  Richard H. Minear

  Many in the English-speaking world need no introduction to Barefoot Gen.[1] They have read the manga, available in ten volumes in fine translation, or they have seen the animated movie, available on YouTube and elsewhere. Barefoot Gen is already international. It started in Japan, as a manga serial, in 1973. Then a relatively unknown manga artist, Nakazawa Keiji completed the serial in 1985. By then it had grown into a ten-volume book. Barefoot Gen’s Japanese readers number in the many tens of millions. And there have been film versions: a three-part live-action film (1976–1980), a two-part anime (1983 and 1986), and a two-day television drama (2007). There is a book of readers’ responses, Letters to Barefoot Gen. On GoogleJapan, “Hadashi no Gen” returns more than two million hits.

  What has its impact been outside of Japan? In the late 1970s there was a first, partial English translation of the manga. It has now appeared in a second, complete translation (Last Gasp, 2004–2009). Volume I has an introduction by Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus. Spiegelman begins: “Gen haunts me. The first time I read it was in the late 1970s, shortly after I’d begun working on Maus. . . . Gen effectively bears witness to one of the central horrors of our time. Give yourself over to . . . this extraordinary book.” R. Crumb has called the series “Some of the best comics ever done.” Wikipedia has articles on Barefoot Gen and Keiji Nakazawa and on the films, the anime, and the television drama. On YouTube, the anime sequence of the dropping of the bomb—in English—has racked up more than one hundred thousand views, and the rest of the anime is also available. There are translations into Dutch, Esperanto, German, Finnish, French, and Norwegian, with others in the works.

  The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen may well come as a surprise to those in the English-language world who don’t read manga or watch anime. I hope it will lead them to seek out both versions. Even those who already know Barefoot Gen may wish to relive that story in a different genre. After all, manga has its conventions, and they differ from the conventions of prose autobiography. In his introduction to the ten-volume English translation of the manga, Spiegelman mentions the “overt symbolism” as seen in the “relentlessly appearing sun,” the “casual violence” as seen in Gen’s father’s treatment of his children, and the “cloyingly cute” depictions. Under the latter category Spiegelman discusses the “Disney-like oversized Caucasian eyes and generally neotenic faces.” Neotenic? Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary (1989) defines neoteny as “the retention of larval characters beyond the normal period; the occurrence of adult characteristics in larvae.” Spiegelman has the latter definition in mind: consider our cover and its fa
ces of Gen, age six, and Tomoko, a few months old.

  Apart from the illustrations he drew specifically for the autobiography, those conventions do not apply to Nakazawa’s autobiography. Beyond the conventions Spiegelman mentions, I would comment that even though he writes of the extreme hunger that most Japanese experienced in 1945, he depicts all of his characters as remarkably well-fed. Such is also the case with the almost Rubenesque figures in the Hiroshima screens of Iri and Toshi Maruki.[2] Nakazawa had no formal training in art, but perhaps conventions of the art world trumped memory.

  The autobiography has appeared in two editions. It appeared first in 1987, with the title The Void That Is “Hiroshima”—Account of the Nakazawa Clan. Nakazawa revised that version and reissued it in 1995 in the version that I have translated.[3] It poses few problems of translation, but I should mention one issue: the names of family members. Throughout the autobiography, Nakazawa refers to his older brothers as “Oldest brother” and “Next oldest brother.” I have identified them always by the given names he uses in Barefoot Gen, Ko¯ji and Akira. He uses given names consistently for his older sister, Eiko, and baby sister, Tomoko. He refers to his younger brother throughout as Susumu. (The manga calls him Shinji. Susumu and Shin are alternate readings of the same character.)[4]

  Nakazawa’s Autobiography of Barefoot Gen makes compelling reading. Mark Selden has written that it is “in certain ways the most riveting book we have on the bomb.” Suitable—if that’s the right word—for readers of all ages, this may be the single most accessible account of the Hiroshima experience. Needless to say, it is Nakazawa’s account, and it is colored by his biases. These include an intense aversion to the wartime Japanese government and its policies, domestic and foreign, and an understandable hatred of the American military that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  This translation preserves the character and quality of the original. To reach the broadest possible English-language audience, I have left few Japanese terms beyond manga and anime untranslated. I have even translated the term hibakusha as “bomb victim” or “bomb victims.” I have deleted specific place names where it was possible to do so without altering the narrative. I provide maps of Nakazawa’s Hiroshima, a limited number of footnotes, and five excerpts from Barefoot Gen. But these additions are not essential to a thoughtful reading of the book. As an appendix I include an excerpt from an interview with Nakazawa that took place in August 2007.

  This book is a translation of Nakazawa Keiji’s prose autobiography. It also includes, between the prose chapters, four-page excerpts from Nakazawa’s graphic novel Barefoot Gen. The complete Barefoot Gen fills ten volumes, a total of some twenty-five hundred pages. These excerpts are intended to give readers who have not read it a taste of the manga.

  Graphic novels are works of art with their own conventions and perspectives. They are not “creative nonfiction,” an oxymoron I encountered for the first time in a discussion of a recent fraudulent book on Hiroshima.[5] They are fictional even if based on actual events. Like Spiegelman’s Maus, Barefoot Gen is an artistic representation of reality. Compare Barefoot Gen and this autobiography, and numerous contrasts emerge. Nakazawa himself has pointed to one important one:

  What differs about the death of my father from Barefoot Gen is that I myself wasn’t at the scene. Mom told me about it, in gruesome detail. It was in my head, so in the manga I decided to have Gen be there and try to save his father. Mom always had nightmares about it. She said it was unbearable—she could still hear my brother’s cries. Saying “I’ll die with you,” she locked my brother in her arms, but no matter how she pulled, she couldn’t free him. Meanwhile, my brother said, “It’s hot!” and Dad too said, “Do something!” My older sister Eiko, perhaps because she was pinned between beams, said not a thing. At the time, Mom said, she herself was already crazed. She was crying, “I’ll die with you.” Fortunately, a neighbor passing by said to her, “Please stop; it’s no use. No need for you to die with them.” And, taking her by the hand, he got her to flee the spot. When she turned back, the flames were fierce, and she could hear clearly my brother’s cries, “Mother, it’s hot!” It was unbearable. Mom told me this scene, bitterest of the bitter. A cruel way to kill.[6]

  Gen’s presence at a crucial moment when Nakazawa Keiji was absent is not the only difference. To sustain the twenty-five hundred pages of Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa invented subplots. One example is the character Kondo¯ Ryu¯ta, who appears nowhere in the autobiography. Astonishingly, the recent fraudulent book treats Ryu¯ta as a real person, including him, for example, in his appendix “The People”: “A five-year-old Hiroshima orphan, unofficially adopted into the family of Keiji ‘Gen’ Nakazawa. He lived in the same neighborhood as Dr. Hachiya.” It’s as if a historian of the European holocaust were to treat one of the characters in Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a real person.[7]

  Barefoot Gen is art. This book is autobiography. Even if, as a genre, autobiography is notorious for a bias in favor of the author, sheer fabrication is beyond the pale.

  A word about “translating” manga. Manga traditionally begin at the “back” of the book—“back,” that is, to readers of English or German or French. The cartoons read right to left, not left to right. The artist conceives from right to left; readers read from right to left. How do translators deal with this fundamental difference of perspective? One approach is to leave the drawings unchanged and simply reverse the page order: the last page becomes the first page, and the first page becomes the last page. This was the approach taken when Barefoot Gen was first translated in 1978. One page (120) is shown on page xii.

  A second approach is to reverse the page order and flip individual panels. The right side of each frame becomes the left; the left side becomes the right. (Digital technology makes such reversal easy.) So readers accustomed to “reading” drawings from left to right get a better sense of what Japanese artists intend and Japanese readers experience. That is the approach of the recent translation from which these excerpts are taken. A version of the same page can be seen on page xiii.

  A comparison of these two examples shows immediately one major disadvantage of flipping pages or panels: the Atomic Bomb Dome here is on the wrong side of the river and to the left of the bridge instead of to the right. We gain in terms of artistic perspective but lose in terms of reality. Further, as this page shows, the third frame has been left unflipped, presumably for aesthetic reasons. On an earlier page (I.111), only one of nine panels has been flipped. This approach emphasizes the integrity of the individual panel, perhaps at some cost to the integrity of the page, especially when the visual impact of a two-page spread is involved. A third approach leaves the Japanese page order and panels untouched and begins at the “back.” This is the approach many recent manga translations take. Whatever its merits, that approach can hardly work here, where the text is English-language prose and the manga excerpts run between chapters.

  The illustrations Nakazawa drew to illustrate this autobiography presuppose a Japanese, not an English-language audience, so I have flipped them; the photographs, of course, are unchanged. But in several of the illustrations Nakazawa drew for this autobiography, Japanese writing is integral to the drawing. Reversing the drawing reverses the characters, too; so a second reversal is necessary. The plates introducing chapters required similar treatment. Still, consider the plate (p. 18) showing Gen’s brother’s school class marching off to evacuation: the teacher leading the way now salutes with his left hand. Similarly, in the plate for chapter 5 (p. 120), reversal turns the right-handed Nakazawa into a left-handed cartoonist.[8] There is no perfect solution. As with all translation from one language to another, so with manga: readers should remain constantly aware that what they have in front of them is an approximation or interpretation of Nakazawa’s original, not a replication.

  Nakazawa Keiji was born in March 1939. I was born less than three months earlier, in December 1938. He experienced wartime Hiroshima, the atomic bomb, and the austerity—t
o put it mildly—of the early postwar days. I experienced Evanston, Illinois, and Newton Center, Massachusetts. I was the child of an academic family. My father was a Protestant theologian; my mother had taught high school English. The Pacific War had no impact on me that I was aware of. How different our two worlds!

  Yet Hiroshima has played a major role in my professional life. In the late 1960s, I grew disaffected with U.S. policy in Vietnam. I remember reading Noam Chomsky’s essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” which appeared first in the New York Review of Books on February 23, 1967. There Chomsky begins by citing Dwight Macdonald on the question of the guilt of peoples for the actions of their governments and mentions Hiroshima briefly: “To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history.” The bulk of that essay was about American war crimes in Vietnam, of more concern to me then than Hiroshima. In a later essay that year, Chomsky quotes Justice Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge at the Tokyo trial, at great length. The passage from Pal concludes: “if any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegitimate in warfare, then, in the Pacific war, this decision to use the atomic bomb is the only near approach to the directives of the German Emperor during the first World War and of the Nazi leaders during the second World War.”[9] With these essays, Chomsky expanded for me the realm of the thinkable and the sayable. That new freedom led directly to the tone and content of my Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (1971), in which I presented Pal’s opinion on a number of issues and found it entirely tenable.

  Beginning in the mid-1980s, I translated the monuments of Hiroshima literature, the literature of the atomic bombing: Hara Tamiki’s Summer Flowers, O¯ta Yo¯ko’s City of Corpses, To¯ge Sankichi’s Poems of the Atomic Bomb, which were all part of Hiroshima: Three Witnessees, and Kurihara Sadako’s Black Eggs. (In press now is my translation of the autobiography of O¯ishi Matashichi, who was on board the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon #5 when it was contaminated by radiation from the U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini in 1954.[10]) In various ways these works affected my teaching, as did the superb film by John Junkerman and John W. Dower about the artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima (1986). So also two short films: The Air War against Japan, 1944–1945, chapter 23 of The Air Force Story, a massive official film history of the air campaigns of World War II (1946), and Hiroshima Nagasaki August, 1945, a compilation of footage taken by Japanese photographer Iwasaki Akira and then kept out of circulation until 1970. (U.S. Occupation censors were responsible for the blackout until 1952; thereafter it was largely a matter of chance.) These two films are short enough that I could show both of them in a fifty-minute class and still have time for discussion. The sound track of the former features triumphant trumpets as the atomic cloud rises over Hiroshima, its inhabitants, of course, unseen. The atonal, otherworldly soundtrack of the latter underscores close-ups of unspeakable human suffering on the ground. The contrast always left my students stunned and questioning.