Gen, the manga hero who carries the suffering and hope of Hiroshima survivors

In March of this year, in its anti-diversity crusade, the Trump administration asked officials at the US military archives to redact content that mentioned the word "gay," including an image of the B-29 plane named Enola Gay , which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II.

What would manga artist Keiji Nakazawa (1939-2012) have thought of this absurd erasure, in the year of the 80th anniversary of the explosion, he who spent a large part of his life ensuring that we never forget the suffering of the victims of the Hiroshima bombing, which he experienced in his flesh and heart?

On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., when the bomb fell on his hometown, Keiji, the fourth of six children in the Nakazawa family, was 6 years old. Among the tens of thousands of immediate victims were his father, sister, and younger brother. The child, who had already faced poverty, hunger, and discrimination for being born into the home of an antiwar artist, survived amidst the chaos. This traumatic experience and the years that followed would become the basis for his magnum opus: Hadashi no Gen , Barefoot Gen in English, known in its first translation as Hiroshima Gen. It is a 2,600-page collection in ten volumes of manga drawn between 1973 and 1985, chronicling Gen Nakaoka's childhood, from the age of 6 until he was 15.

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