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The Hiroshima Survivor Who Drew Godzilla

The original Godzilla film was made by survivors of World War II, and they poured the nightmares they witnessed into a monster still pointing up the folly of man 70 years later. But while special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya took refuge in a bomb shelter as Tokyo burned again and again, and director Ishiro Honda’s train passed through the ruins of Hiroshima on his long journey home from China, none of the cast or crew are known to have been survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which loom over the film and (to wildly varying degrees) the franchise as a whole. I am aware of only one person involved with the Godzilla series who was a hibakusha: Keiji Nakazawa, who adapted Son of Godzilla for the manga magazine Shoenen in January 1968.

Nakazawa was in first grade when the U.S. dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. He lived only because he happened to be standing behind a concrete wall of his school. His father and younger siblings burned alive in the wreckage of their house; the child his mother bore that same day died soon after. As a young mangaka, he avoided talking about his horrific experience personally or professionally until his mother’s death in 1966. Following cremation, he was stunned to find her bones had all crumbled into powder, so weakened were they by exposure to radiation. He began reflecting on the culture of silence in Japan about the atomic bombings and started work on Struck by Black Rain, set in postwar Hiroshima, almost immediately. It proved a hard sell, and Son of Godzilla was one of several adaptations (Gamera vs. Gyaos and Ultraseven were others) that Nakazawa worked on to make ends meet until Manga Punch finally bought it.

Like virtually all Godzilla manga, Son of Godzilla has never been translated into English, officially or otherwise, so I can only offer a few visual observations. Nakazawa squeezes the film’s basic events into 32 pages; with a small cast and a single island as the setting, it seems to survive the process better than most entries in the series would. He doesn’t mention in his 1994 autobiography what he made of that story, which involves an errant weather control experiment bathing the island in radioactive, mantis-mutating rain and Godzilla, scourge of Japan, becoming a dad, but one minor deviation from the film stands out. When the Radioactivity Sonde explodes, the flash plays across the scientists’ faces. Here’s that panel paired with Little Boy’s detonation in Nakazawa’s autobiographical one-shot I Saw It:

On a lighter note, Minilla becomes a far more spirited character in Nakazawa’s hands, an imp dodging swings from the Kamacuras moments after he’s born. He even rescues Maki and Saeko from Kumonga. The tradeoff is that he has less of a relationship with Godzilla; the famous scene where the tyke learns how to fire atomic breath is omitted, and while Minilla has no trouble producing a fiery ray, Godzilla reduces Kumonga to bubbling goo by himself. Even their final scene is less personal, with Minilla riding on Godzilla’s back instead of them embracing as the snow piles up. At the time, Nakazawa was mostly writing boys’ adventure stories, and this approach definitely shows it.

Nakazawa’s most famous work, Barefoot Gen, built on I Saw It, following young Gen Nakaoka (a thinly-veiled version of Nakazawa) from 1945 to 1953. Embraced by peace activists, it was the first multivolume manga translated into English. I’m in the process of reading it and found the first volume in particular uniquely distressing. After the first Godzilla was completed, Honda concluded it was better off for his failure to completely achieve the realism he had aimed for, that there was a distance between the monster’s rampages and the actual war. No such mercy with Barefoot Gen—this is the first nuclear attack as it happened, Nakazawa’s cartoonish, kid-friendly style only making it more disturbing.

80 years later, most of the hibakusha, including Nakazawa, are gone. Nuclear weapons are not. On the contrary, many nuclear powers are expanding and modernizing their arsenals, and their aggression towards non-nuclear powers inevitably forces them to consider their own deterrents. That this is happening as the obliteration of two Japanese cities fades from living memory feels especially dangerous. But the words and the art of the survivors remain for those willing to seek them out. I’ve heard a lot of talk lately, as free expression online comes under attack from all directions, about the importance of fiction that aims to unsettle. Today is a good day to be uncomfortable.