Otaku Champloo

Tag: keiji nakazawa

  • History MMF: Little Loud Voices: World War II Remembered by 3 Artists

    War is a victorious, perhaps bitter, maybe a painful playground for adults. In war, we imagine soldiers moving to shoot their enemies, nurses rushing to heal the injured, politicians and generals posing in front of battle plans, and civilians running away from the crossfire. Our memories of war are ingrained with images of adults trying to make sense out of that chaos. For years we have been surrounded by timeless photographs and movies about that war that to this day, we envision the war strongly as an adult’s world.

    But what about the children? Where is the child’s place in our social memory of the Pacific war?

    Finding the child’s place in social memory entails an understanding of social memory and the value of children’s experiences in relation to the grand historical World War II narrative. Their frail voices in World War II histories speak of how much their war experiences have been neglected. However, as these children find their voices as adults, the recollection of their World War II experience as children becomes unbearably loud.

    These are the memories of three Japanese children during the war against the images of Japanese childhood as constructed by Japan’s propaganda machinery. The memories of Keiji Nakazawa, Osamu Tezuka, and Shigeru Mizuki present a different story of the Pacific War —providing a fresh yet powerful social memory that makes us question on how war affects people at all ages.

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  • Proyektong Gen || Project Gen

    Proyektong Gen || Project Gen

    When the Philippines think of World War II, we do not think of Poland, D-day, Churchill, or Hitler. Instead, the prominent things that we think of are Hirohito, Yamashita’s Gold, MacArthur, and the Japanese. The memory of Japanese involvement in the war effort is deeply ingrained in our system that to this day, if you’re not speaking to a kid who has adored Naruto or anime since forever, the rest of the people would think of the Japanese as abusers, sexual criminals, and narrow-minded people. They were always different from us and we would never be like them. We are not like them because we’re not the kind of people who can exploit a nation or a region as much as they did. Unlike the rest of the world, however, talking to everyday folks make me feel that the nation has not forgotten the Japanese. I think our nation still has some bitter resentment towards Japan. We somehow cannot forgive them after the war.

    Since the war, Japan has made an effort to amend their sins during the war. They have invested money in building companies, roads, Japanese studies departments, and all that jazz in the effort to bridge the chasm that was brought on by the war. One of those projects was a translation project on the classic manga by Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen, now featured for this month’s Manga Moveable Feast. This translation project was brought on by a group that proudly took the name Project Gen.

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