Nakazawa, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer.
Although famous for the manga that graphically illustrated the horrors of the atom bomb, when Nakazawa began his career he had vowed to never speak of the bomb again, and in fact avoided discussing his childhood experiences with the people he met in Tokyo.
Nakazawa was born March 14, 1939, in the city of Hiroshima. His father, Harumi Nakazawa, was a painter in the traditional Japanese style who was imprisoned during the war for his anti-war activities. The young Keiji and his family were ostracized as traitors, yet his father was unrepentant. Keiji was just six years old--in the first year of primary school--when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing no fewer than 70,000 people in the initial blast, among them Keiji’s father, older sister, and younger brother. Keiji, who was just 1.2 kilometers from ground zero at the time, was spared because the wall of a building shielded him from the flash of heat. Keiji’s mother, Kimiyo, was pregnant at the time, and seeing her husband and two of her children trapped in their burning home, her daughter already apparently dead, her son screaming for help, tried to run into the blaze in order to die with them, but was restrained by neighbors. The shock caused Kimiyo to give birth prematurely, and the baby, a girl, died four months later.
After graduating junior high school (high school is not required in Japan), Nakazawa began work for a sign maker in order to improve his technical skills. He would paint signs every day, draw manga every evening, and on Sundays watch three movies in a row at the local cinema. During these years, Nakazawa submitted his work to such boys’ magazines as Omoshiro Bukku (“Funny Book”).
In 1961, at the age of 22, with the equivalent in today’s dollars of about $600 in his pocket, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo and began working as an assistant to manga creator Daiji Kazumine. In 1963, Nakazawa made his professional debut in the magazine Shōnen gahō (“Boys’ Illustrated”) with Spark 1, a story of car racing and industrial espionage. Having grown up subject to the prejudice faced by survivors of the atom bombs, Nakazawa was determined to make a fresh start in Tokyo, and none of his earlier works even hinted at his past. That attitude changed dramatically in 1963, when his mother at last succumbed to the effects of the radiation poisoning she had incurred 18 years earlier, just eight months after Keiji’s marriage to Misayo Yamane. Following the traditional cremation, it is customary to gather certain bones that can be relied on to survive the fire and place them in the family grave. Yet Kimiyo’s bones, apparently degraded by radiation, did not survive the procedure, and only a fine powder remained.
With the birth of his first child, Keiko, in 1967, Nakazawa began to work at a fevered pitch, focusing on manga with commercial potential, but also seeking a publisher for “Pelted By Black Rain.” At last the story was accepted by Manga Punch, an adult-oriented magazine that specialized in borderline pornographic manga. It was to be the first in a series of eight “Black” stories, each dramatically illustrating the various cruel ways the atom bomb and war had destroyed so many lives. The unifying themes of these and his later Hiroshima tales are anger, mad grief, and a throaty, insistent “J’accuse!” directed at the U.S. government, the wartime Japanese government, weapon makers and war profiteers. The characters in his stories are not saintly martyrs, forgiving those who wronged them and appealing for world peace with Buddha-like serenity. They are ordinary, flawed people with modest dreams whose lives are torn apart by forces far beyond their control, and they are angry.
In 1970, the war in Vietnam was heating up, and Japanese students were marching in the streets to protest Japan’s role, which was (and is) largely dictated by Japan’s Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with the U.S. Nakazawa’s anger was rekindled, and given new urgency by fears that his own daughter might join the ranks of the children of A-bomb survivors who, despite having been born years after the war and far from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, were being diagnosed with leukemia at higher rates than the general population. Nakazawa created a new story, planned to be 60 pages long, about a Hiroshima survivor whose son develops leukemia and dies. When Nakazawa showed the pencilled draft to Jump editor Tadasu Nagano, the editor broke down and cried. He told Nakazawa to make it 80 pages, an unheard of length for a single piece in a boys’ weekly. More realistic and hopeful than his earlier (and appropriately titled) “Black” series, “Aru hi totsuzen ni” (“Suddenly, One Day”) resonated powerfully with young readers. Nagano gave Nakazawa a slot in Jump to write more anti-war stories or a regular basis
In 1972, Nagano asked Jump’s contributors to create short stories based on actual events in their own lives. Nakazawa’s, published in the October issue of Special Edition Shōnen Jump, was to be the first, and by far the most dramatic. The 48-page “Ore wa mita” (“I Saw It!”) was the first work in which Nakazawa had set down his own experiences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in pictures and words.
After reading “I Saw It!,” Jump Editor in Chief Nagano asked Nakazawa to do a long series based on his autobiography. Barefoot Gen began serialization on the pages of Weekly Shōnen Jump in June 1973. But the window of opportunity provided by the times and by a visionary editor proved to be a brief one. Nagano was promoted and replaced with a new editor in chief. The oil crisis had caused the price of paper to soar, and the magazine had to cut back on the number of pages per issue. More importantly, though, the content of Barefoot Gen was ill-suited to the fast, action-oriented pace of a weekly magazine, where a creator is expected to pump out one 16-page episode per week. The series was cancelled, unfinished, after just a year and a half.
Times had changed, and publisher Shueisha was now reluctant to have its company associated with a politically controversial work in the form of a Barefoot Gen trade paperback edition. They also believed a manga about the atomic bombing would not sell. In 1975, Nakazawa finally found a publisher for the Gen paperbacks, Choubunsha. The edition drew the attention of the media, and contrary to the predictions of Shueisha brass, was a massive commercial success. The ongoing story of Gen went on to be serialized in three different magazines: Shimin (“Citizen”), Bunka hyōron (“Culture Critique”), and finally Kyōiku hyōron (“Education Critique”). All were left-leaning magazines, the last being the official publication of the Japan Teachers Union. Both Citizen and Culture Critique had to cancel the series for financial reasons, but Barefoot Gen was finally completed in the pages of Education Critique in 1985.
Barefoot Gen was first dramatized as a series of three live-action theatrical films in 1976, 1977, and 1980. In 1983 and 1986, it was made into two animated films, and in 2007, it was adapted as a two-part live-action television drama. In 1981, it was performed as an opera. The animated version of Gen was once widely shown in elementary schools, but some scenes are so horrific that parents complained of their children being traumatized. Many schools have since replaced Gen with “softer” alternatives. Nakazawa himself was characteristically blunt on the subject: “I would hope that children seeing the animated version would be traumatized, and learn to despise the atom bomb.” In his autobiography, he even went as far as to say, “Children who screamed and wept! Thank you! You now know the true horror of the atom bomb.”
Barefoot Gen was translated into English beginning in 1976 by a group of student volunteers who called themselves Project Gen. It was the first multi-volume manga series to be wholly translated into English. In 1980, Leonard Rifas spearheaded the first partial publication of Barefoot Gen in the United States as Gen of Hiroshima. Other foreign-language editions include French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Thai, Norwegian ... even Esperanto. Yet Nakazawa had said that of all people, he wishes most of all that Americans would read Gen. He was quoted as saying, “I wish that President Obama would read it with his daughters.”
Nakazawa hated platitudes and whitewashing. He generally avoided the annual peace memorial observances in Hiroshima, considering them pointless. “They never demand accountability. They make their call for peace, they ring their bells. That’s not what it’s all about. You need anger.” He had no use for doves. He was plainspoken, and he repeatedly and loudly proclaimed the late Showa Emperor to be ultimately responsible for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His stance on the Emperor system and Japanese war crimes, as well as his apparent communist sympathies, earned him the hatred of Japan’s right wing.
In 1947, when Nakazawa was still in elementary school, the Showa Emperor visited Hiroshima. The school children were lined up along the route, given flags, and told to cheer “Banzai!” when the Emperor passed. The young Keiji had no doubt that this was the man who had killed his family. As the limousine passed, he kicked a shard of roofing tile, striking the car. Describing the incident in an interview in 2007, 60 years later, the anger was still fresh.
