Depicting War Today

Seventy-five years have passed since the end of the Asia-Pacific War. Postwar manga in Japan have told stories of the war in various forms. The very fact that the word “postwar” serves as a historical divider signifies that Japanese people understand “contemporary times” to mean “the period after experiencing the war.” On the other hand, as war survivors reach old age and pass away, the question arises: how do generations that never experienced war firsthand confront war? To answer this question, we introduce contemporary works of manga that bring readers face-to-face with the realities of war.

In this manga, Kouno paints a detailed picture of life during the middle to the end of the war for protagonist Suzu, who leaves Hiroshima to join her new husband in the naval port city of Kure. Based on thorough research, Kouno’s detailed reconstruction of life during the war and her depiction of landscapes that reflect the subjective viewpoint of Suzu, who loves to draw, make readers realize the irreplaceability of this “corner” of the world. The manga is also a pioneering work that opens up the possibilities of manga expression itself, such as in its distorted depiction of the world “like a world drawn by a left hand” after Suzu loses her right (drawing) hand at the end of the story.

In this manga, which begins with a quote by the novelist Tim O’Brien: “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. […] Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t,” Daisuke Nishijima constructs a fantastical story about a Japanese-American military photographer and a Vietnamese girl guerilla with superhuman physical abilities, while incorporating vast amounts of information about the Vietnam War. His work reminds Japanese people that wars continued to rage in various parts of the world even during the period known as “postwar” in Japan and makes readers think about the fact that war is now being enjoyed as a form of entertainment.

A brutal war unfolds, waged by girls using adorably sweet desserts and fruits as weapons, as pictures and words from the battlefield are recorded in a notebook. "Strawberry War", which is actually bound like a small notebook, is a collection of story fragments that tests the reader’s ability to connect fantasy and reality through the imagination. Following this, "Paraíso" is a story based on the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. Rather than innocent victims, the manga depicts girls who each carry their own sins and questions the relationship between war and humans as beings who cannot avoid doing wrong.

When Yuki Ozawa, in high school, heard from her father about her father’s experiences of detainment in a Siberia, she was shocked to learn that it was nothing like the “experiences of war she knew about from dramas and novels.” Thirty years later, she asked her father about his experiences once more and turned them into a manga. She depicts the brutal labor endured in the camps by detainees who had no idea what the future held in store for them, how long their detention would last, or even what had become of Japan and the world, in a level of detail that only someone who experienced it could know. In doing so, she demonstrates the power of manga to give shape to and preserve memories.

Peleliu is a small island in Palau. On this beautiful island, the location of a Japanese airfield, a battle took place between 40,000 attacking U.S. troops and 10,000 Japanese troops who were ordered to hold out until the end. The battle is narrated from the perspective of Tamaru, a Japanese soldier and aspiring manga artist charged with the task of writing letters to the surviving families of dead soldiers to inform them of how they died. Tamaru feels conflicted by his duty to glorify the deaths of his friends, who are dying one after another on the battlefield, as he desperately tries to survive the battle himself. This work, which tells a story about the reality of “everyday life on the battlefield” through cartoonishly-proportioned characters, also poses questions about the element of fictionality inevitably involved in the process of “telling a story.”