Barefoot Gen - The Hiroshima Anime
What I love about my (relatively recent) fascination with Japanese media is that I often find things that surprise me.
More often than not these clips surprise me with their absurdity or their artistic sensibility, but in some cases, I find that I am really moved by what I find. In these cases, it’s often because the images are so strong, so intense that one cannot help but be affected by them no matter what culture one calls home.
This is one of those times.
Barefoot Gen is a manga (then made into an anime) based on one survivor’s experience of Hiroshima and the experience of living through the atomic bomb that was dropped there in 1945.
Written & illustrated by Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen told the story of Gen who was six years-old when the bomb was dropped. In this interview with the Comics Journal, Nakazawa recounted how difficult it was to delve into his relationship with the bomb and the war and, additionally, how he felt a number of Japanese had never dealt with their responsibility for it.
Below lies an very graphic clip from the Barefoot Gen anime. To me, it conveys the raw frightening power of the atomic bomb in a way I’ve never seen nor could I’ve imagined. For a child of the 80s, nukes were the boogeyman and this brings it all back. If you have other clips, hopefully subbed, let me know and I’ll throw them up here.
The YouTube user CometeRouge (who uploaded the clip) has linked to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum from YT. I feel obliged to do the same.
WARNING: This is not for the slight of heart or stomach. This is a VERY graphic depiction of death by nuclear explosion, albeit animated.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Culture, Drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Marcus June 16th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
This video almost made me cry. I can’t beleive some people still defend that bombing.