Hiroshima (17 page)

From a distance came shouts of “Banzai! Banzai!” and the emperor's car appeared. The teachers ordered us to shout “Banzai!” and wave the flags. I could see him through the car window: he had on a black coat, with a white scarf about his neck, and he was waving his soft hat to the people lining the road. In the instant the car passed in front of me, I felt the impulse to leap at the emperor, set my teeth in his neck, and kill him. I got hot all over even in the cold wind; I was so worked up I had sweat on my back: “This guy! How dare he kill Dad and Eiko and Susumu! How dare he consign the rest of us to life in the depths!” I shook in my fury, my whole body hot with anger, and I glared at the emperor. With my worn clog, I kicked a piece of tile lying at my feet. It hit a tire and bounced back.

I desperately repressed my rage amid the flags teachers and pupils waved, amid the shouts of “Banzai!” That scene I engraved on my heart; I'll never forget it as long as I live. The teachers and citizens waving flags to the emperor seemed utterly foolish. I knew the fearsomeness of “education,” that apparatus that brainwashed the Japanese people, that beat militarism into them.

In the next day's paper, I read an article saying that with the emperor's visit to Hiroshima, the residents hoped to rise above the disaster of the atomic bomb. I roared: “Ridiculous! To place your hopes of life on such a shitty emperor! If you want us to have hopes of living, then bring us a bushel of rice!” A distasteful expression on her face, Mom said sternly that I should stop criticizing the emperor. Mom had learned from experience, draining the dregs from when Dad had been arrested and locked up by the Special Police. I really hated that attitude of simply giving up: “yield to superior power,” “there's nothing for it but. . . .” I couldn't bear to live with bowed head and not to go against the establishment, to be a toady as a strategy for getting ahead in the world.

Encountering
New Treasure Island

In order to earn a bit more, Mom stopped painting for Uncle H. and turned to needles, making use of a craft she'd learned as a girl. Needles and pins were a product for which Hiroshima Prefecture was noted. Mom could grasp dozens of finished needles in one hand and sort good from bad. It wasn't something just anyone could do. A person whose palms sweated easily was said to have a “salty hand” and couldn't get work in the industry. If your palms sweated, they got salty, and the pins rusted and were no good. At good times, Mom often hummed popular romantic tunes from the twenties. In particular, she loved the
Gondolier's Song
: “Life is short.
. . .”
[4]
She sang as she looked at the needles in her palm. When she was in a good mood, I was truly happy.

Although Mom and K
o
¯
ji were working hard, we were still poor. It was not uncommon for wages to be delayed and for us to go several months without cash income. During such times I worked hard to increase my own small earnings, gathering metal, glass, and bricks from the burned-out waste. I could sell copper and brass and lead in particular at a high price, so even on my way to school, I always kept my eyes peeled for these metals. If I saw something that looked promising, I'd scratch it on the pavement. Copper shone red when scratched; brass shone yellow. Rejoicing—“Red!” “Yellow!”—I'd tuck it away in my pocket, take it home, and save it up. Then I'd sell it to a metal dealer and earn a few pennies.

With that money I'd buy a penny's worth of sweet potato jelly and go to the movie house that had opened in front of Hiroshima Station and, entranced, watch the old silent films. The storyteller came by each night and I would watch, enthralled, my heart racing.
[5]
I got to know the storyteller and took on the job of walking around clapping the clappers to summon an audience. I went around the neighborhood—Clap! Clap!—summoning the children. In return, I got to watch for free and was given a chopstick wrapped in pickled seaweed and dipped in malt syrup. The storyteller prided himself on narrating with seven different voices. Enraptured by his impassioned performance, I worshipped him.
Golden Bat
and
Little Big Man
were hits that transported the children of the ruins during the postwar period.

There was a comic saying, “With the new education, we're good only at baseball.”
[6]
I, too, loved sandlot baseball. We used cotton army gloves in place of mitts, and we broke off tree branches and peeled the bark to make bats. To make balls, we wrapped string around the glass balls from lemonade bottles.
[7]
We ran about barefoot on the burned waste, among the shards of glass and pebbles, immersed in three-base baseball. We threw ourselves about recklessly.

One day I encountered a terrific manga book; it changed my life. Artwork by Sakai Shichima, story by Tezuka Osamu:
New Treasure Island
.
[8]
A classmate had brought
New Treasure Island
to class and was reading it. Around him gathered a human wall, one child's head beside the next, unmoving. I too was one of them, waiting for the owner to turn the page, following the frames intently. The boy who owned the book was a stinker, and he'd close the book or take forever to turn the page. I'd read along, getting angry and scolding him, “Turn the page! Open it wider!”
New Treasure Island
unveiled a truly fresh and adventurous dream. I wanted to read what happened next and couldn't wait for recess to come. To get the owner to turn the page, I toadied to him and flattered him. Thrilled, I lost myself in reading it.

I wanted to read
New Treasure Island
at my leisure, all by myself, and pleaded with him earnestly to let me borrow it
.
But he refused stubbornly: “If I let you, Dad'll scold me!” So I asked, “Well, then, tell me where you bought it!” He replied, “Dad went to Osaka on business and bought it for me there!” I couldn't go all the way to Osaka to buy it, but I was utterly in love with
New Treasure Island
and had to have a copy. I made the rounds of all the bookstores in the heart of the city, on Hatch
o
¯
bori, and at the Hiroshima Station plaza, scanning the bookshelves, eyes peeled.

Finally, at a small bargain bookstore at Yokogawa Station, I spotted
New Treasure Island
on a shelf, and I was madly happy. I grabbed the money I'd saved up selling scrap metal—I always kept it in my pocket so I'd be able to buy the book—and thrust it at the bookstore man. I always squeezed the ten yen notes, so they were all crinkled.
[9]
I'll never forget my joy and excitement when the long-desired
New Treasure Island
was finally mine. I danced my way home and immersed myself in it. I read it hundreds of times, thousands of times. I memorized the icon at the top of the page where the main character rode on a giant snake. I memorized the text, of course, even the sound of the drums of the attacking natives.

New Treasure Island
is an important work—you simply can't write the postwar history of manga without including it. During the war, of course, there were manga
.
But I didn't find those manga
all that fascinating.
New Treasure Island
was so dazzling that for me it might as well have been the very first manga. Today's manga boom got its start with
New Treasure Island.

New Treasure Island
was issued in 1947 and is said to be the single best seller of the early postwar era. I learned later that it sold between four and five hundred thousand copies. The author's name engraved itself on my heart and never faded. For me, “Tezuka Osamu” was godlike. For a long time we didn't read the characters of his given name “Osamu;” among K
o
¯
ji and the children, it was “Jimushi” or “Harumushi.”
[10]

Collecting scrap metal, saving up my money, I searched intently for Tezuka's works and bought them all.
Pistol Angel
,
Twenty Tobies
,
Enchanted Forest
,
Big City Metropolis
,
Lost World of the Last Century
,
The World of the Future
,
Faust
,
Crime and Punishment:
every one of Tezuka's works, so numerous as to be uncountable, had an impact on me.

Dad had been an artist in traditional ink painting, and from my earliest days I'd been fond of seeing and drawing pictures. I hated virtually all my schoolwork and liked only the art class. There's an adage, “Become expert at what you love.” I'd become a manga fanatic, and it wasn't enough simply to read them. I wanted to draw them myself. I began to copy lots of them and develop my own style of drawing. With enormous excitement, I devoted myself to drawing manga. No matter how poor you are, the day you spread your wings and set off into a world of your own is truly fulfilling, impossibly happy. I couldn't buy expensive sketch paper, so I'd wander the black market at Hiroshima Station plaza and tear down movie posters and the like, take them home, cut them to size, sew them into a notebook, and draw manga on their blank backs.

Day after day I drew manga. I became a movie fan, too. The worlds of manga and movies, I thought, seemed mutually intelligible. The construction of the film image and the manga frame, the use of words, the ways of presenting the progress of the drama and building tension, and the like: there were tons of things in film to learn from. Wanting to learn, I watched the screen intently.

In Matoba-ch
o
¯
, right next to Hiroshima Station, there was a movie house that split the week between old foreign movies and Japanese movies. The price of admission was the odd sum of two yen ninety-nine sen. According to the tax law, if you charged three yen, you had to add tax, so this odd price avoided the tax. Playing hooky from school or after school, I'd grab three yen and, not wasting any of it on tram fare, plod barefoot on my frequent visits to the movie house. There I saw countless films. And I gained a great storehouse of treasure—the philosophy, ideas, and history necessary for life. The messages I learned from films were far more significant and useful than the lessons I learned at school.

At that theater I saw virtually all the famous prewar films and engraved them scene-by-scene on my heart. In particular, I'll never forget
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
—the adroitness of its camera angles against the backdrop of Notre Dame, the power of its drama. It was remade later starring Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida. In Japanese cinema,
The Far Side of the Mountain
and
Silver Peaks
had a permanent impact.
[11]

I memorized, too, the names of actors, more and more of them. All the Japanese actors and actresses, of course.
[12]
Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, James Cagney, Randolph Scott, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Alan Ladd, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne. Susan Hayward, June Allyson, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Piper Laurie, Martha Hayes. I stored countless names in my memory. Chaplin, the Mutt-and-Jeff combo Abbott and Costello, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye—all were important characters useful in comic manga.

As I came to love film, my desire to draw manga increased. We were forbidden by the school to go to see movies alone, without father or older brothers, but had I obeyed that rule, I would never have become the person I am today. I saw countless movies, so they were a great source of inspiration in drawing manga. Teachers and well-intentioned fathers and older brothers believed that if kids went to the movies on their own, they'd turn into delinquents. I hated people who held that crazy idea so much it made me want to throw up. Sitting on the stage, the shadow of my head falling on the screen, I watched films that forbade admission to people younger than eighteen because of sexual content or violence.
[13]
To say that children would immediately run amok if they saw such films! Or that on seeing a gangster film they'd suddenly become no-goods! I had no love for a school that had such simplistic, silly ideas.

When I saw Walt Disney's
Snow White
, I couldn't forget it. For weeks afterward, scenes came to mind, one after the other. Moreover, learning that it was made, in color, before the war, I was speechless at the splendor of America's power. To go to war with that America! I had no sympathy for the bunch of fools who were Japan's wartime leaders. That Japan would lose was a foregone conclusion.

At the Hatch
o
¯
bori trolley stop was Hiroshima's only seven-story department store. On its seventh floor there was a movie theater, and there I saw famous films like
Beauty and the Beast
and
Black Narcissus.
[14]
If you went out onto the roof garden, Hiroshima lay spread out, a panorama. By 1950, the burned-out ruins of atomic desert were completely covered by huts. I was stunned by the power of man's drive to live. Three or four years earlier, this burned-out store had housed many moaning burned and injured bomb victims, but year by year it was rehabbed, and high-class goods came to be displayed, more and more, on the store's counters. It was a great playground for us. From early in the morning on vacation days, we'd ride the elevator, going up and down over and over again. In summer we'd run about the store virtually naked, wearing only loincloths. The store clerks were amazed and disgusted.