There’s many stories on World War 2, this one in particular is about the bombing of Hiroshima. However I’m not looking at the war, the politics, or the people in control. But the story of a young boy, who overcomes one hardship after another — his story of human suffering changes to human triumph!
A summary of the film
The story begins with Gen and his family, of two parents, his older sister and his younger brother — trying to survive in wartime with very little food to go around the town, and especially difficult for Gen’s mother who is pregnant. The two sons Gen and his younger brother Shinji always keep a positive attitude, they’re your stereotypical two younger brothers. They play, they fight and they cause trouble. The film shows the struggles of war; not on the large scale but the struggle for the individuals, each and every person is affected. Gen and his brother try to help out by catching fish and sacrificing their food for their mothers wellbeing. It’s hard for them to understand the full scale of what was going on. It’s a heartwarming start really, you truly connect with the family and what they are going through even though we’ve never been in a situation like that.
Animation has the beautiful way of making everything seem so homely and cozy; beautiful scenery, calm and quiet movements, and light orchestral beats. The first half of this film does have a similar tone to ghibli and disney films. And even though it’s set in wartime there’s this positive feeling that everything’s going to be alright in the end and that the war might finally be over soon. That was until the clock turned to 8:15 on August the 6th. That’s where the film shows its true colours. A flash of white, the blood red as skin melts off pink faces. Before finally settling to black — black rain.
The true story behind the film
For the following decade after the Atomic bomb, information was still heavily censored from authorities in both Japan and the West, and it was the work of the survivors to show the scale of what the disaster was really like, which they did through artistic means like poems or paintings such as Iri and Toshi’s The Hiroshima Panels. The term A-bomb literature came about to describe all these artistic works before being attributed solely to the literary genre. Which leads us to two decades after Hiroshima when Ibuse Matsuji’s novel Black Rain was published, a turning point for A-bomb literature. Being regarded as the peak of expressing and representing the nuclear experience it was praised on release rather than being shunned like works prior. It set the way for A-bomb literature and cinema to move away from simply anti-war to more protagonist focused stories, and actually showed the individuals who suffered from the effects of war. And in turn the book inspired Keiji Nakazawa to write about his experience for the first time in the 1968 book Struck by Black Rain.
The original author of Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa is someone who even in the hardest of situations managed to keep a positive attitude. Because Barefoot Gen is not only his fiction but his life, based on real events in which Nakazawa managed to survive the bombings of Hiroshima, and what happens to Gen’s family and the struggles he went through is all what happened to Nakazawa. In the 60s he moved to the big city of Tokyo to pursue his dream of becoming a manga artist which he’d aspired to be since childhood. By the 70s he began telling his story in order to educate future generations about Atomic warfare and the horrors of Hiroshima, and believed his Manga could achieve do this!
Which is what makes Nakazawa and Gen’s story so beautiful in a way. It’s the raw, uncensored, autobiographical criticism on war. The story just bleeds out passion from start to end. And how Nakazawa managed to draw the manga as well as the screenplay for this film, when you see Gen, a 6 year old boy, sat there crying outside his destroyed home with his family burning alive. Such a personal moment for Nakazawa that he has shared with the rest of the world, is something that propels Gen’s story into something that can only be viewed as a piece of beautiful artwork.
And that’s why Barefoot Gen and other Atomic bomb works are so important. Not only do they show a true and uncensored take on what really happened once that bomb was dropped, but they can and should be used to educate future generations. In 1973 Black Rain was included in Japanese textbooks, the same year Barefoot Gen manga began publication. However decades later issues around the censorship of hiroshima goes on. In 2013 the city of Matsue banned Barefoot Gen from appearing in school libraries, before several protests came about the book was allowed back into schools. And in 2016 an undelivered letter was found wrote by Nakazawa to Obama the 44th president of America, in which he asked the president to read Gen’s story together with his wife and his two children who were 11 and 8 years old at the time. And even though Gen’s story is graphic and disturbing, so were the real events. Atomic bomb literature; be it poetry, documentaries or anime has a key role in our society to educate future generations about what we’ve done, and what we should do in the future.
Barefoot Gen might be just a work of fiction but it’s story and core important message is something that should be taken note of. Gen and Nakazawa’s story is one to educate and inspire. To show the contrast of the bomb — humanity’s human’s most horrific creation, with the story of the survivors — one of human triumph. It’s no surprise that this story inspired countless volunteers to translate the ten part manga series across the globe. Which was not only adapted into this animated film and its sequel, but also five novels, 3 live action films, a television drama, an opera, and even a musical. When in the most difficult of situations Gen manages to overcome one hardship after another with courage, determination and a smile — a story to inspire!
I also made a video version of this article with cool editing:
