Punk & Pedagogy
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Barefoot Gen, Vol. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima cover
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Barefoot Gen, Vol. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima

by Keiji Nakazawa

Hiroshima, drawn by a child who lived it.

For you if

you want the war told by someone who was small enough to be missed.

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$20 MSRP · Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Keiji Nakazawa was six years old when the bomb hit Hiroshima, and he lost most of his family that day. He turned it into a manga about Gen, a boy from a poor Hiroshima family who survives the blast, and the war years leading up to it. It starts with hunger, a father jailed for speaking against the war, and neighbors who turn on them. The bomb, when it comes, is drawn without mercy, and what follows is a story about staying alive.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Japan
Voice
Written by a Japanese author
Themes
absurdity of warsurvivalwar and childhoodwar and civilianswar and trauma
Topics
atomic bombbombing of hiroshimaworld war ii

Graphic violence and suffering throughout, so this sits on the adult shelf, not the kids one. Reported to have been removed from Matsue city school libraries in 2012 and later restored; verify details before using that in public copy, so isBanned stays false. Companion to Black Rain, already in the catalog. Confirm the edition and price; the manga runs ten volumes.

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Princess Mononoke poster

Princess Mononoke(1997)

dir. Hayao Miyazaki

Same country: Japan

Industry versus forest, and no easy villain.

Ashitaka, a young prince cursed by a boar-god turned demon, travels west to find a cure and ends up in the middle of a war between Irontown, a community of ironworkers led by Lady Eboshi, and the forest spirits led by the wolf-goddess Moro and her human daughter San. Nobody is simply right. The ironworkers are feeding lepers and freed women, and the forest is dying to feed them.

Why it’s here: Miyazaki refuses the easy version of a fight between industry and nature: the people destroying the forest are also building a refuge, and the film makes you hold both. What's punk is that it won't pick a villain who can be shot, and that its hero's job is to stay between the sides. What's pedagogical is that it hands young viewers a systems problem with no tidy answer. Good for a family watch with older kids; it has real violence.

Where to watch: HBO Max; rent Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango At Home (~$3.99)Letterboxd ↗

Shoplifters poster

Shoplifters(2018)

dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Same country: Japan

A family made of what gets left behind.

Osamu and his son shoplift to top up low-wage jobs. One cold night they bring home a neglected little girl and fold her into a family crammed into one tiny house in Tokyo. Whether they are a family at all is the question the film keeps unpicking. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018.

Why it’s here: The film makes a crime out of survival and a family out of people the state forgot, and it never lets you settle on who the villain is. What's punk is that it treats the poor as full people, not cautionary tales, in one of the richest countries on earth. What's pedagogical is the question underneath: what do we count as a 'real' family, and who decides when a child is better off taken?

Where to watch: Free on Kanopy; Netflix, PrimeLetterboxd ↗