Roots of Strength: Reviewing ‘Barefoot Gen’, A personal history

Barefoot Gen (1983)
Language: Japanese
Director: Mori Masaki
Genre: Animated War Drama

“Sometimes it takes more courage not to fight than to fight, to not want to kill when everyone around you is calling out for blood”, these are the most hard-hitting words in the movie Barefoot Gen, based on a Japanese manga (anime magazine). Barefoot Gen is the story of a young boy Gen and his survival during the Hiroshima bombing of 1945, recounted by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor himself. It also draws a larger picture of the
bomb explosion and its aftermath, honestly narrating the worst atrocity of human civilization.

Gen’s father, a pacifist and an anti-war citizen during a very nationalist wartime Japan, is struggling hard to sustain the Nakaoka family through poverty, hunger and helplessness. Gen’s pregnant mother is malnourished like his sister, Eiko. Shinji is Gen’s younger sibling who helps Gen and their father in the wheat field, dreaming of days when they will get to eat again.

On 6th August, American planes drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, in which Gen’s father and siblings burn in the explosion. With the responsibility of the mother and the baby, Gen starts his battle for survival, bumping into scenes of death, radiation poisoning, acid rains, and all the catastrophic tremors the society has to face due to one bomb. He helps his mother deliver the baby daughter, Tomoko, and struggles to find food and milk for her.

The family welcomes Ryuta, a little boy orphaned by the bomb who resembles Shinji and helps Gen in his perseverant efforts for sustenance. They search for a job and land up one where they are paid to take care of a bomb victim named Seiji, in whom they re-instill life and hope. They’re too late to get milk for Tomoko, who dies of malnutrition, and leaves Gen in despair and gloom. When Gen witnesses the growth of wheat and his hair (which he had lost due to radiation effects), he remembers what his father said, and resumes life with hope and enthusiasm.

Gen makes a boat with a candle and as he promised Shinji before the attack, he flows it in the river, which is symbolic of how life goes on in spite of tragedies and death. Another symbol is wheat, which survives in the coldest and the most inhospitable conditions.

The film has some of the goriest visuals of the war effects and burning of people and buildings. Even the image of 6th August on the calendar sets fear in one’s mind. Though animated, they never fail to send a chill down the spine as they reflect the deadly visuals of a nuclear tragedy, and about war’s impact on civilian societies. The film critiques the ruling elite and Japanese militarism, but never finger points. That it does not feel important to comment on the USA’s role at all is a puzzle, which could be interpreted or solved in different ways.

The film carves out lovingly, the relationship between Gen and Shinji, which also continues after Shinji’s death, with Ryuta as Shinji. It gives us some of the best scenes of the movie where one laughs at the love and cries at the tragedy around it. Eiko’s character, shown weak and timid, has little role and dialogue, which is a statement of the position of a girl child in a society, which needs the blood of young men. The mother’s role strikes the most when she frantically shows her newborn daughter the war that killed her family. The father and his messages sustain themselves through out the movie and are something we would want to take home.

The word ‘Gen’, which means ‘the roots’ in Japanese, is an apt name for our protagonist as his story is a root of strength for the coming generations. The view of war as seen through a young boy’s eyes deconstructs the impersonal information about wars as rote written in our textbooks. The film doesn’t limit itself to Japan, but speaks for the act of war and the story of survival everywhere in the world.

-R. Gandhi.