In Barefoot Gen "Vol. 1: The Appearance of Gen Aomugi", an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima City by the U.S. Army on August 6, 1945 and exploded. Immediately afterwards, houses collapsed and burned, and the father, sister and brother, who were buried together and could not move, burned to death all at once. Barefoot Gen and his mother, who were left behind after the atomic bomb exploded, fled the area around the hypocenter, which had become a burning place with Hibakusha suffering from burns. Later, Barefoot Gen fled with his mother, who was carrying a newborn baby. Since the end of the war, he has lived through a variety of hardships.
Nakazawa Keiji, the author of Barefoot Gen, used his own experience of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in the first year of elementary school as the source of his long manga series in Shonen Jump, which depicted the harsh lives of atomic bomb survivors during and after the war, when the Hiroshima bomb exploded. Barefoot Gen was published at the end of the Pacific War, set in the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and featuring second-year elementary school student Nakaoka Gen as the main character. The Nakaoka family, engaged in the manufacture of painted clogs, was very poor, and their five children grew up healthy during the war. However, when their father spoke out against the Pacific War, they were marginalized and discriminated against as unpatriotic, and were driven into the shadows.
Eventually, after the war, he met his eldest son, Koji Nakaoka, who had volunteered to join the Japanese army's preliminary training program, and his second son, Akira Nakaoka, who had been evacuated from his school. They were joined by Ryuta, an orphan who bore a striking resemblance to his younger brother, Shinji Nakaoka, who had been burned to death. The lives of the Hibakusha unfolded more fully, but the point of the manga was to depict the cruelty and misery of war through the reality of their miserable lives.
The point of this manga is to depict the cruelty and misery of war through the realities of the Hibakusha's miserable lives. The younger generation after the war has no experience and ignorance of the mass abuse and genocide of war. They have been brainwashed with a distorted sense of war through television, movies, cartoons, and video games. The horrors and deprivations of war are not limited to the bursting of atomic bombs, shooting and air raids on the battlefield. Anyone who does not criticize, oppose, or actively cooperate with the war effort is discriminated against, ostracized, abused, and slaughtered. Moreover, the aftereffects of the war have left grievous wounds even after the war.
Barefoot Gen never gave up and crawled through such circumstances during and after the war. The boy known as Barefoot Gen becomes the protagonist of the story, which depicts more poignantly the tragic lives of the atomic bomb survivors during and after the war, when the Hiroshima atomic bomb exploded. During the war, the Nakaoka family was evacuated from their surroundings as an unpatriotic family, and after the war, they were marginalized as outsiders. To the generation born after the war, which was completely indifferent and ignorant of the cruelty and misery of war, Barefoot Gen manga depicts war and peace in a small, light and gentle way.
In 2005, at least, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Thai, Esperanto, Norwegian, and Polish editions of Barefoot Gen have already been published.
The author, Nakazawa Keiji, talked about Barefoot Gen as follows. It's hard to draw a manga about an atomic bomb, but children can honestly discern what is true. That is why I continued to draw while relaxing and hoping that the children would be able to enter the work, rather than straining their shoulders. It is my hope that they will be able to grasp the real thing and understand what the atomic bomb is.
