KEIJI NAKAZAWA: When I was 22, I couldn't stand it anymore. I decided I had to draw manga full-time, so I moved to Tokyo. It was 1961. I found a tiny three-mat room in the Yanaka district, and started carrying my manuscripts around to different publishers.

ALAN GLEASON: Did you have letters of introduction or anything?

NAKAZAWA: Nothing. I'd just walk in and ask them to look at my stuff. Mostly they'd just say, "Looks interesting, come by again when you have some more." Finally, I made my debut in the monthly manga magazine Shonen Gaho [Boys' Pictorial]. It happened pretty fast, actually -- I'd only been in Tokyo a year when I got the job. The title was Spark One. It combined auto racing and spy intrigue.

GLEASON: What was the connection between auto racing and espionage?

NAKAZAWA: One racing team was trying to steal the secrets of another team's car design. That ran in Shonen Gaho for a year. I got another job doing a short sci-fi series called Uchu Jirafu [Space Giraffe] for the manga weekly Shonen King.

When those series ended, I started working as an assistant for Naoki Tsuji, who was a very popular cartoonist. During that time I also was doing short pieces for magazines like Kodansha's Bokura [We], Shonen Sunday and Shonen magazine. I did all kinds of genres -- sci-fi, baseball, samurais -- I liked drawing them all, so I'd try my hand at anything.

GLEASON: Were you being commissioned by the magazines to draw specific types of stories?

NAKAZAWA: No, I'd draw what I wanted and peddle it around.

Then, in 1966, my mother died. I got a telegram and rushed back to Hiroshima, but it was too late; she was already lying in a coffin. I was so grateful to her. If it hadn't been for my mother, who knows what would have happened to me. I would've been a war orphan -- I'd either be dead or in jail, most likely. I went to the crematorium to collect her ashes. Actually, when you're cremated, there are always some bones left -- the skull, backbone, arm and leg bones. But there were no bones left in my mother's ashes. Nothing. It was an incredible shock to me. I think the radiation must have invaded her bones and weakened them to the point that they just disintegrated at the end. I was appalled.

Since coming to Tokyo, I hadn't said a word about being an A-bomb survivor to anyone. People in Tokyo looked at you very strangely if you talked about it, so I learned to keep quiet. There was still an irrational fear among many Japanese that you could "catch" radiation sickness from A-bomb victims. There were plenty of people like that, even in a big city like Tokyo.

I was enraged that the bomb had taken even my mother's bones. All the way on the train back to Tokyo, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I realized I'd never thought seriously about the bomb, the war and why it happened. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was that the Japanese had not confronted these issues at all. They hadn't accepted their own responsibility for the war. I decided from then on, I'd write about the bomb and the war, and pin the blame where it belonged. Within a week after getting back to Tokyo, I wrote my first work about the bomb, Kuroi Ame ni Utarete [Struck by Black Rain]. It's about young people in postwar Hiroshima getting involved in the black market for weapons. The main character is an A-bomb survivor whose hatred drives him to kill an American black marketeer. He asks the Americans, "Who are you to talk about justice when you massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in the firebombing of Tokyo? Was that what you call justice?"

The editors who read Struck by Black Rain were very moved by it and told me to write more. I wound up writing five books in my "Black" series -- Black River, Black Silence and so on. Black Rain was published in serial form in Manga Punch, an "adult" manga magazine by a small publisher, Hobunsha. The big publishers turned it down. They said it was too radical for them, too political.

GLEASON: What was it they objected to, specifically?

NAKAZAWA: They said they were afraid they'd get harassed by the CIA or sued by the U.S. government for writing about the A-bomb. When I mentioned this to my editor at Hobunsha, he laughed and said, "Hey, they can arrest me! That would be great publicity!"

But "adult" -- meaning erotic -- magazines like Manga Punch had a very small share of the market. I wanted to write on these themes for a bigger publisher. I was lucky to find a very good editor at one such publisher, Shueisha. His name was Tadasu Nagano. He really championed my work. He urged me to write more about the A-bomb, so I began my "Peace" series, starting with Aru Hi Totsuzen ni [One Day, Suddenly].

GLEASON: So by the late '60s, you were writing manga primarily on themes like the war and the A-bomb. Did you write about your own Hiroshima experience in those works?

NAKAZAWA: Oh yes, I based a lot of what I wrote on my own experiences. But it didn't really occur to me to write about what happened to me personally until the magazine Monthly Shonen Jump started running a series of "cartoonist autobiographies." They asked me to write one about myself. At first, I didn't want to, but they kept after me. The result was Ore wa Mita [I Saw It]. When Nagano read it, he told me, "You should do a longer series based on this. You can make it as many pages as you want and we can run it for as long as you want." I could hardly believe it. That was the first time an editor had ever said anything like that to me. I was incredibly grateful, and felt I should do the best job I could. That was how Hadashi no Gen [Barefoot Gen] came about.

If it hadn't been for Nagano, Gen never would have happened. But after a year and a half, he was kicked upstairs and made director of his division, and another editor took his place at Jump. The new editor had different tastes, and decided to cancel Gen. After that, the monthly magazine Shimin [Citizen] picked it up for a year. They went out of business, so next Gen moved to another monthly, Bunka Hyoron [Cultural Criticism], where it appeared for three and a half years. Then that magazine ran out of money, so Gen moved to Kyoiku Hyoron [Educational Criticism] for another three and a half years.

GLEASON: What pace was Gen being serialized at in these publications?

NAKAZAWA: Sixteen pages, every month. That took Gen up to its present ending, ten volumes' worth.

GLEASON: Someone once told me he thought that Jump had cancelled Gen due to right-wing pressure. Is there any truth to that?

NAKAZAWA: No, none whatsoever; it was just the whim of the new editor. We expected right-wing pressure, but we never experienced any. When Gen first appeared, I warned my wife to be prepared to get hate mail or threatening phone calls. Not a thing. Gen only got praise. Even the right-wingers cried when they read it!

GLEASON: You've also mentioned before that the Japanese left wanted to use Gen for their own political agenda, and that at one point the Japan Communist Party pestered you to join them.

NAKAZAWA: Oh yeah, sure, but I just said no. They left me alone after that. Actually, you could say the Communists turned me down too; Bunka Hyoron was affiliated with the Communist Party, but they cancelled Gen when they ran out of money.

GLEASON: So for several years, you were kept busy with Gen. But you were writing other works, too, during that time, right?

NAKAZAWA: Oh yes, quite a few. I wrote for Monthly Champion and Manga Action. Mostly social commentary, but lighter stuff too. I did a manga called Yakyu Baka [Baseball Fool], about a kid who really was a complete fool for baseball. You get tired of doing serious stuff all the time! But I was also doing work in the same vein as Gen and Okinawa. I did a serial called Geki no Kawa [Geki's River] about a boy growing up in Manchuria when it was a Japanese colony.

GLEASON: At some point, you also started giving talks in public. When was that?

NAKAZAWA: I guess after Gen first appeared as a four-volume set, so that would be in the mid-'70s.

GLEASON: You were speaking about your experiences as an A-bomb survivor?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, and about peace issues. To citizens' groups, schools, teachers' groups around Japan.

GLEASON: Are you still doing that?

NAKAZAWA: Not now. I'm tired. I was still doing it last year, but I don't want to anymore. At the peak, I was giving 20, 25 talks a year.

GLEASON: What would people ask you about?

NAKAZAWA: They wanted to know what the war and the atomic bombing were really like. It was the first time people had heard the truth. That's what they told me everywhere I went.

GLEASON: I've heard that Japanese school history books don't say much of anything about the bomb. Why not?

NAKAZAWA: The government probably doesn't want to risk encouraging anti-American sentiment. But the facts are the facts. People should be told what happened.

GLEASON: Americans, too, generally know about the two A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but hardly anyone knows about the extent of the B-29 air raids that leveled most Japanese cities before that. In Tokyo alone, 100,000 people were killed in one night of fire-bombing -- that's nearly as many as died in Hiroshima. And though most Americans know about the A-bombs, a common knee-jerk reaction to any discussion of their effects is "What about Pearl Harbor?" -- that sort of thing. Even Americans who consider themselves liberals tend to have very mixed emotions about the A-bombs -- whether they were necessary to end the war or not. Yet those who read Gen often say it is more even-handed than they expected in spreading the blame for the war. You don't just blame America for dropping the bomb, you blame the Japanese militarists for starting the war, and the imperial system for allowing the militarists to wield such power in the first place. You definitely don't come across as anti-American. Is that how you always viewed the war, even when you were young?

NAKAZAWA: Well, I spent a lot of time thinking about why it happened. And if you think it through, the answer clearly lies with the militarists and the imperial system. And as a young kid, of course, I'd heard my father criticizing them too.

GLEASON: As you were growing up in postwar Hiroshima, did you talk about things like that with your friends?

NAKAZAWA: Never! Everyone had their hands full trying to survive. I kept my thoughts to myself. If I tried to bring it up, no one wanted to hear about it.

GLEASON: When did you start talking about it?

NAKAZAWA: Pretty recently, I guess. It's only lately that I've really started speaking out about how bad the entire imperial system is. For a while I only expressed those views in writing, through my manga starting in the '60s.

GLEASON: But I gather that, even if you didn't talk directly with your colleagues about your experiences, you could tell that people like your editor Nagano shared your views.

NAKAZAWA: I was really very lucky to have an editor like him. Without Nagano, I never would have been able to draw the "Peace" series. And he knew it, too. He'd say to me, "There are 40 editors here at Jump and I'm the only one who understands what you're doing!"

GLEASON: Would you talk to Nagano about your views on the emperor?

NAKAZAWA: Not really, but he knew how I felt from my manga. And he never censored a single word of what I wrote.

GLEASON: Was there ever pressure from his higher-ups at the company about your work?

NAKAZAWA: Oh yeah. One series I did, Okinawa, was going to be published in book form by Shueisha. But the top brass pressured them to cancel it.

GLEASON: Was that before the U.S. had returned Okinawa to Japan [in 1972]?

NAKAZAWA: Before.

GLEASON: Do you think the cancellation was for the same reason you gave that Japanese textbooks don't talk about the A-bombs -- to avoid provoking anti-American sentiment?

NAKAZAWA: Certainly. That wasn't my purpose in writing it, but they assumed I was criticizing the U.S. occupation of Okinawa. The top management at Shueisha was very nervous about such things.

GLEASON: Don't you find it odd that they'd allow you to write about the A-bomb, but not about Okinawa?

NAKAZAWA: I guess they thought the Okinawa theme was more controversial because the situation was still "delicate" -- it wasn't resolved yet at the time.

GLEASON: Did you have any other run-ins of that sort?

NAKAZAWA: That was about the extent of it. The problem is that I got labeled as a lefty cartoonist. That's still how I'm viewed by the media.

GLEASON: When did they first start labeling you as that?

NAKAZAWA: Ever since Gen, I guess. There simply weren't too many other cartoonists taking on controversial issues like the war and the political system.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #256.]

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