More than 10 million copies of the late Nakazawa Keiji‘s manga series, Barefoot Gen, have been sold worldwide. The manga, which charts the story of a boy called Gen who survives the atom bombing of Hiroshima, has been translated, mostly by volunteers, into 20 different languages.
This English language version of a recent documentary video by the Japanese television company, NHK, looks at the growing popularity of the Barefoot Gen manga series around the world in countries such as the USA, which is the only country to drop an atomic bomb in wartime, and Iran, a country which is pursuing its own controversial nuclear program.
The video looks at what Nakazawa Keiji intended to convey in the manga series and describes how he struggled to make the first edition of the story more popular with a post-war Japanese audience.
According to the narrator,
People everywhere feel empathy toward the message of Barefoot Gen, not just the tragedy of the atomic bomb, but other problems the world faces today…
