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113 Chapter Eight Nakazawa's A-bomb, Tezuka's Adolf, and Kobayashi's Apologia "The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia," writes Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (xiv). This zeitgeist of looking backwards materializes in Japanese manga and anime as a belated rendezvous with World War II, as a gaze across half a century into the Rising Sun and the invariable averting from the blinding rays of wartime history. Japanese comic's "return of the repressed" entails a coming to terms with the collective trauma that allegedly ended in 1945, yet this yearning to engage a specific past of great pain is adulterated by the human instinct for pleasure and a withdrawal from pain. After all, any gaze into the sun results in a turning away, lest blindness or madness set in. Instead of staring into the sun himself, Vincent Van Gogh lets, maintains Georges Bataille, his sunflowers do that ("Sacrificial Mutilation"). Bataille further casts this paradox of attraction and revulsion of the sun in the image of Icarus: "the summit of elevation is in practice confused with a sudden fall of unheard-of violence. The myth of Icarus is particularly expressive from this point of view: it clearly splits the sun in two—the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus's elevation, and the other that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close" ("Rotten Sun" 58). Drawn to the best and the worst of times of imperial Japan, the three manga artists— Keiji Nakazawa in the 1970s, Osamu Tezuka in the 1980s, and Yoshinori Kobayashi at the turn of the century—manage to capture, in the words of Bataille, either "the preceding sun (the one not looked at) [which] is perfectly beautiful" or "the scrutinized sun [which] can be horribly ugly" (57). Rather than dwelling on Japan's historical responsibility over the war, Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen represents the tragedy of the atom bomb from the lone perspective of a pacifist family, Tazuka's Adolf gives vent to a bizarre anti-Semitic Hitler myth, and Kobayashi's On Taiwan peddles his right-wing apologia for Japanese militarism. Either from the left or the right of the Japanese political spectrum, the wartime Rising Sun is viewed obliquely like Hokusai's famous "One Hundred Views of Fuji." 114 Chapter Eight In order not to gaze unblinkingly at the sun or the Japanese wartime history, both Nakazawa and Tezuka locate their subject matter in the pacifist minority during and immediately after the war. Favoring left-wing liberal politics, the two manga artists make possible the English-speaking reader's sympathy and even identification with the antiwar position of the protagonists, who are, needless to say, victims of conservative, militaristic forces of the time. Who can argue with the tragedy of hibakusha (explosion-affected persons) in Nakazawa, except to say it is not balanced by any representation of Japanese aggression and atrocities? Indeed, there is no representation at all of Japanese oppression of its colonies other than one Korean character forced into hard labor in Japan. Tezuka weaves his version of the Hitler myth by means of, likewise, an antiwar protagonist. From Nakazawa's A-bomb testimony, Tezuka moves into the controversial realm of "imagining Hitler" (see Rosenfeld, Imagining Hitler). Yet the witness and the daydreamer are replaced on the threshold of the twenty-first century by Kobayashi's virulent reactionary polemic. The antiwar position shifts into its nemesis, or Kobayashi's diatribe advocating a revival of the Japanese spirit symbolized by militarism. Composed for the Japanese domestic market as well as, strangely enough, a sizeable market in Taiwan in Chinese translation , Kobayashi's On Taiwan was not and will most possibly never be translated into English. By contrast, in English translation, Nakazawa appeals to a global readership in terms of the antinuclear peace movement and Tezuka by way of the fascination for Hitler. Not only are the three artists looking, obliquely, at the sun, but the global audience does the same in English, Chinese, and other translations. Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen Six years old at the time of the atom bombing of Hiroshima, Keiji Nakazawa in his early career as a cartoonist refrained from the subject altogether, "hat[ing] the very mention of the word." Nakazawa continued to reminisce in "Introduction: My Hope for Barefoot Gen" in Barefoot Gen: Out of the Ashes, which was the fourth and last of the series: "But in October...

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