Barefoot Gen

Covers. Always. Lie.

"Wheat pushes its shoots up through the winter frost, only to be stepped on again and again. The trampled wheat sends strong roots into the earth, endures frost, wind and snow, and grows tall... and one day bears fruit." —Daikichi Nakaoka

Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン, Hadashi no Gen) is a manga by Keiji Nakazawa, based on his own experiences as a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and on his one-shot autobiographical story I Saw It. It ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1973 to 74 and later in other seinen mags (Shimin, Bunka Hyōron and Kyōiku Hyōron), was made into a a live-action movie trilogy (from 1976 to 1980), two anime movies (in 1983 and 1986; the first one covers the first two tomes), some novels, and a two-episodes 2007 TV mini-series.

The story begins in August, 1945. Gen Nakaoka is a young boy living in Hiroshima, suffering from the wartime shortages and rationing. His family (artist and craftsman father Daikichi, Housewife mother Kimie, older brothers Kouji and Akira [ in the manga ], older sister Eiko and younger brother Shinji) can barely grow enough food to feed themselves (and are harshly mistreated in the original manga, because Daikichi is a pacifist), and his pregnant mother is weak from malnutrition. While air raid sirens are a daily fact of life, the city has been spared the heavy bombings others faced, though Daikichi believes it will happen sooner or later. Gen even prepares to show Shinji a small wooden boat he earned by helping some neighbors.

And then, Little Boy drops. What follows are some of the most horrifying images put to paper.

In the chaos that follows the blast, Gen loses most of his family, and his mother gives birth prematurely. In the following weeks, they struggle to find food and shelter. Japan surrenders, the American occupation begins, and criminal gangs and the black market appear in force. Radiation sickness takes its toll. The Nakaoka family survivors (Gen, Kimie, the newborn Tomoko, and in the manga Kouji and Akira) and a boy named Ryuuta Koundou who's taken in by them, must learn to survive in this changed world.

As Gen matures into a young man and the series shifts from a shounen manga to seinen one, the series takes on a more political tone, covering the social climate of the Occupation, the Korean War and Japan's rearmament, the search for meaning in the lost war, and finding an identity in the face of discrimination as an A-bomb victim. Though these parts tackle powerful subject matter, they are often overlooked by the public, either because they weren't made into movies, or perhaps because they come across at times as anti-American, anti-Japanese, and anti-Hiroshima City Government in particular. Regardless, the manga doesn't end with 1945. Read it on here

A critically acclaimed work, Barefoot Gen helped break the silence surrounding the atomic bombings in Japan, and raise awareness about the survivors. It is one of the few Japanese works to avoid the Nuclear Weapons Taboo.

Compare Grave of the Fireflies.

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Tropes used in Barefoot Gen include:

• Actual Pacifist: The Nakaoka family is harshly mistreated because the father, Daikichi, is this to a T.
• Adapted Out: Gen's older brothers, Kouji and Akira, are taken out of the anime movies. They do show up in the live action films, but Akira is excluded from the 2007 series.
  • Same to Gokichi, Gen's crippled cousin, in any non-manga media. Considering what happened to him... oof.
• Age Lift: Eiko is 11-12 years old in the manga, but seems to be around 14-15 in the anime. Probably to fill a little in the shoes of her Adapted Out big brothers.
• An Arm and a Leg: In the manga, Gen's cousin Gokichi was horrifyingly blinded, disfigured, and had his four limbs amputated due to war injuries. He was also in constant pain, barely able to move (Dankichi compares him to a potato), and often begged his parents to give him a Mercy Kill.
  • Also in the manga, the owner of a local store was sent to the front and lost one of his legs in an explosion.
• Apocalypse How: One of the smaller ones, since it's "only" a major city, but considering how the atom bomb affected everyone's perception of warfare...
• Author Avatar: Gen is essentially Keiji Nakazawa himself. Like his character, Nakazawa was seven years old when the bomb fell, and lost his entire family except for his mother. He also eventually moved to Tokyo to pursue his career as an artist. The entire work is basically a fictionalized account of the author's youth, albeit a little less directly than in I Saw It.
• Barefoot Poverty: Given the setting, even food was hard to come by, much less shoes. It's even in the title!
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted (and hard). One of Gen's friends, a girl named Natsue who wanted to be a dancer, had half her face burnt off. And the infamous Atomic Bomb scene starts with a little girl being literally burned to a crisp, and a young mother and her baby are among the following victims.
• Better to Die Than Be Killed: The first volume of the manga has a very direct and graphic description of how Okinawa citizens killed themselves at the end of the Battle of Okinawa to not be captured by Americans. A group of young mothers jumped off cliffs with their kids. A teacher and her students chose to poison themselves. A soldier blew himself up alongside an old woman and some kids with a grenade...
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Gen's baby sister Tomoko, born right after the deaths of her father and two of her siblings. She perishes soon after, however.
• Body Horror: So many people were so badly burned as to literally melt, and some had wounds that kept getting infected (and full of maggots)
  • As said above, Gokichi Nakaoka lost all four limbs and his eyes.
  • Poor, poor Seiji Yoshida...
• Bowdlerize: Believe it or not, brutal as the the anime movies could be, they were QUITE lighter than the original manga. The first one cuts down a LOT of the harassment that the Nakaoka family went through at the hands of other Hiroshima citizens before the bomb was dropped, among other things.
• Break the Cutie: To the fucking extreme.
• Childhood Friends: Kimie is this with a woman named Kiyo, who attempts to help her and the kids by renting them a room after Hiroshima is bombed. Problem is, Kiyo's mother-in-law and her Spoiled Brat kids Tatsuo and Takeko harass and bully the fuck out of her and her children, to the point they kick them out of the house. It's revealed in the manga that the old woman hated Kouji because he looked exactly like her son/Kimie's late husband Shouzo, who was killed in the war.
• Crapsack World: Japan, both pre-and-post-war, mostly post-war.
• Corporal Punishment: In the manga, Gen's teenaged eldest brother Kouji first works in a factory, then enrolls as a member of the Japanese Navy in an attempt to "clean up the family's honor". New recruits like him are horribly, horribly beaten by superior officers if they fail even a little; in fact, his companion Hanada commits suicide over the abuse.
  • Kouji already was abused and mistreated at the factory he worked on, as he's beaten up due to Daikichi's pacifism!
  • While Daikichi is a good person and loves his children, he's not afraid of hitting them if he truly believes they crossed the line. (Only the boys, however, he never lifts a hand towards his only daughter). One of the biggest examples is how he beats up Kouji bloody when he decides to enroll in the Navy and says it's to clean up the family's honor; to a smaller degree, he also does this when he catches Gen and Shinji singing anti-Korean songs.
• Dead Hand Shot: The atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima just as Gen was arriving to his school and was talking to a female classmate (anime) or a woman around his mom's age (manga). When Gen comes back to his senses after the explosion, he sees that either of them is severely wounded (the girl has half her body burned and one of her eyes has melted away!) and trapped under the rubble, but her hand's sticking out of it. He grabs said hand to pull her out, but then he realises she's actually dead and pulls away in horror. In the anime, the girl's hand stays up and pointing at the skies...
• Delivery Guy: Gen is forced to deliver his baby sister Tomoko when all the surviving doctors and nurses in the area are too busy trying to help people who were burned and irradiated by the bomb.
• Doomed Hometown: Hiroshima. It gets rebuilt, of course, but hope for a new beginning is enveloped by bitterness, as many surviving residents suspect--perhaps rightly--that the future Peace Park in the center of town is partly supported by land speculators buying up property which conveniently has no one left to claim ownership. And they sell this manga in the museum gift shop.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Eventually, the adult Gen more or less manages to settle down.
  • The first anime film finishes with Gen, Kimie and Ryuuta mourning their loved ones while slightly more at peace.
• Empathy Doll Shot: In the manga, there's a description of how Okinawa mothers would kill themselves and their kids by throwing themselves off cliffs to avert surrendering to the USA soldiers. A little girl named Hiroko objects and hugs her doll, then her mother tearfully apologizes before grabbing her and jumping off with her in her arms - and soon, the doll is seen on the nearby rocks, lying atop of a pool of blood that is either Hiroko's or her mom's...
• Everybody's Dead, Dave
• Eye Scream: In the first film, we see people's eyes melting out of their sockets.
  • In the manga, many people either suffer the same fate.
• Does Not Like Shoes: Subverted. Several charas don't use shoes but it might be more that they really can't afford shoes, and have simply gotten used to "doing without"
• Gonk
• Gratuitous English: The anime has English dialogue from the pilots about to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, with Japanese subtitles.
• Identical Stranger: After Gen's whole family aside from his mother is killed by the bomb, they meet a little boy named Ryuuta Kondou who looks exactly like the deceased Shinji. They take him in as one of their own, simple as that, with no negative emotional hang ups over the uncanny resemblance. VERY refreshing and heartwarming. (In the manga there are more Ryuuta / Shinji parallels, but they still come to consider him as one of them). Rather tellingly, the anime casts the same seiyuu for both boys and they're played by the same child actor in the 2007 TV specials.
  • Despite the burns on half her face, Gen's newfound friend Natsue heavily resembles Eiko.
  • In the manga, Kouji's physical similarity to a dead man named Shouzo triggers the fuck out of Shouzo's mother, who mistreats the family as a result
• Ill Girl: Kimie, and later Natsue and Mitsuko
• Ill Boy: Gen is hired by the Yoshida family to take care of the patriarch's younger brother, Seiji, an artist who also survived the nuclear blast but was left severely ill to the point his body is pretty much falling apart and the rest of his family, save for his older brother, heavily discriminate him.
• Imperial Japan
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: As the bomb obliterates Hiroshima, a brief scene shows a young woman and a kid being subjected to this with broken glass shards from a shattered window, and a man having his stomach pierced by a big wooden beam.
  • In the manga, as Gen is helping out a bunch of survivors, a little girl has glass shards all over her head, face and arms.
  • Also in the manga, Ryuuta Kondou's father ended up fatally impaled in the torso and to a nearby tree.
• Infant Immortality: Averted. Infants, small children, animals...they all die. In fact, as said above the first seen victim of the Bomb is a little girl who looks younger than both Gen and Shinji...
  • At some point, when Gen makes an Innocently Insensitive remark about bombs, Kimie scolds him and reminds him that a young girl they knew was shot dead by a plane's machine gun because she couldn't reach a shelter in time. In the anime it's worse, she and her baby brother that she was carrying on her back are seen being killed.
• It Got Worse
• It Can't Be Helped: Many of the citizens in Hiroshima use the phrase to explain why they accept the military rule, and the acceptance of the below-poverty conditions that cause many of their citizens to starve.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: The Nakaoka house collapses on itself and Daikichi, Eiko and Shinji are trapped in the rubble - and for worse, the neighborhood is on fire. The still living and mostly unharmed Gen and Kimie attempt to pull them out, but Daikichi tells them to leave and save themselves since they still have a chance. They both initially refuse, with Kimie even saying she'd rather die with them, but when Daikichi tells Gen to take care of his mom and unborn sibling, he starts pulling the maddened Kimie away from their burning home with Mr. Pak's help.
• Laughing Mad: Poor Kimie...
  • In the manga, poor Kouji also does this when he tries to warn his friend and fellow recruit Terukichi Hanada's parents that he hung himself due to the abuse he went through in the Navy, but they selfishly refuse to believe it and tell him he must be lying because they're sure Terukichi died heroically for the Emperor.
• Mood Whiplash: The beginning almost seems like a slapstick comedy, given Gen and Shinji's roughhousing.
• No Koreans in Japan: Averted with Mr. Pak. Gen's family are the only Japanese friends he has, with Daikichi even severely scolding Gen and Shinji when he catches them singing racist songs. Pak turns out to be a vital asset to the family later, thanks to him helping out Gen save Kimie and how he becomes quite the figure in the black market.
• Orphan's Ordeal: Gen and Ryuuta. In fact, in the manga Ryuuta explains that his father died in the explosion and his mother kicked it when their house collapsed on her few afterwards.
• Our Zombies Are Different: In fact, they are not actually zombies...but something far worse: living people who were so badly burned and injured (and probably disoriented) that all they could do was shamble and moan until they eventually died.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Poor Kimie... first she has to witness her daughter and youngest son burning to death in the wreckage of their home, then she loses her infant daughter because her breast milk is contaminated.
• Police Brutality: In the manga, Daikichi is at the receiving end when he's arrested for being an Actual Pacifist.
• Put on a Bus: Akira, the second son of the Nakaokas, is sent to the country with other kids his age early in the manga. He returns to the story after he and one of his friends escape due to how badly they're treated by some of the locals, but later returns to the countryside and stays there for a while more, reuniting with the family later.
• R-Rated Opening: Averted. While the beginning talks about the war up until that point, nothing that graphic is shown and it quickly seems like it's just a daily life story about a boy and his family in the middle of a war. Then the bomb hits. See Mood Whiplash above.
• Sailor Fuku: Eiko is briefly seen wearing a white and blue one in the anime, when the family must go into a bomb shelter in the middle of the night.
• Scenery Gorn
• Shaggy Dog Story: Baby Tomoko is suffering from malnutrition because Kimie is not producing milk. Thus Gen and Ryuta go get a job to buy milk for the baby. A bunch of stuff happens, and they buy a lot of milk so Tomoko would be satisfied for a long time. They get home only to find Kimie cradling the dead baby who died from the malnutrition just before they returned. The scene adds yet another Tear Jerker to one of the most depressing stories ever told.
• Shameful Strip: The preteen Eiko is almost subjected to this in the manga, when she calls out the bully Ryuukichi. Gen fiercely defends her, even biting the boy's fingers for it. Later it happens to her for real, when she's falsely accused of having stolen money from the school - due to Ryuukichi's manipulations and the teachers' hate for the Nakaoka family's pacifism. When Daikichi finds out...
• Sick Sad World: And it's autobiographical.
  • At least it got published. Or maybe it doesn't matter.
• Significant Double Casting: In the original Japanese, Shinji and Ryuuta have the same VA and later are played by the same actor.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Very much toward the cynical side, despite the cartoony art style. Most characters are assholes only out for themselves, or who are needlessly cruel to Gen and others because they can be. Both the Americans and the Japanese come out looking very bad.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The Japanese deny anything happened in Hiroshima immediately afterward, while barring entry; in Real Life, the Japanese and the Americans both denied the atom bomb.
• Team Mom: In the anime, the teenaged Eiko must help Kimie at home and is at least once seen disciplining Gen and Shinji. She also takes care of the weakened Kimie when she briefly collapses, and also tries to help Daikichi with his woodcarving work.
• True Companions
• War Is Hell: The whole point of this manga/film