2017年05月06日
Comic ‘BAREFOOT GEN’Keiji Nakazawa pinx
‘Barefoot Gen’ is a popular comic novel which ran in a weekly magazine. At that time, more than two million copies of the magazine were published every week.
The hero’s name Gen means a root or a source in Japanese. The cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa said the following, confiding to Gen about his wishes: I want Gen to become a source of the new generation’s strength with the strength to say no to oppose nuclear weapons, stepping on the scorched earth in Hiroshima with his bare feet and feeling the firm ground on his feet.
The cartoonist had a hellish experience of the A-bomb when he was seven. In an all-action comic-book format, he describes the miserable state of Hiroshima that had the first atomic bomb in the history of mankind and the way of living there after that in his comic ‘Barefoot Gen.’ He says that most of the story is true.
Gen loses his father, sister and brother in the roaring flames. He meets an orphan named Ryuta who is the very spitting image of his brother. Their way of bearing up well under difficult circumstances and living strongly and manly makes the readers touched.
Gen in the English version is going to tour around the world and keep telling about the importance of peace, the terror of atomic weapons and the stupidity of war.
Project Gen, a volunteer group in Japan, started to produce the
The hero’s name Gen means a root or a source in Japanese. The cartoonist Keiji Nakazawa said the following, confiding to Gen about his wishes: I want Gen to become a source of the new generation’s strength with the strength to say no to oppose nuclear weapons, stepping on the scorched earth in Hiroshima with his bare feet and feeling the firm ground on his feet.
The cartoonist had a hellish experience of the A-bomb when he was seven. In an all-action comic-book format, he describes the miserable state of Hiroshima that had the first atomic bomb in the history of mankind and the way of living there after that in his comic ‘Barefoot Gen.’ He says that most of the story is true.
Gen loses his father, sister and brother in the roaring flames. He meets an orphan named Ryuta who is the very spitting image of his brother. Their way of bearing up well under difficult circumstances and living strongly and manly makes the readers touched.
Gen in the English version is going to tour around the world and keep telling about the importance of peace, the terror of atomic weapons and the stupidity of war.
Project Gen, a volunteer group in Japan, started to produce the
English version of ten volumes of ‘Barefoot Gen’ through Last Gasp in
the US in August 2004. The complete 10-volume English-language edition
was published in 2009.
the US in August 2004. The complete 10-volume English-language edition
was published in 2009.
