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▼ KANTA ON MANGA / WWII Tale Recalls The Horrors of Battle
- Category:Event
The manga this week
Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise
By Kazuyoshi Takeda (Hakusensha)
In 1943 during World War II, Japanese and U.S. forces fought a battle on Attu Island in the North Pacific, in which nearly all of the 2,600 Japanese soldiers deployed on the island were killed. To glorify their efforts, the term gyokusai (shattered gem) was used.
The expression derives from a passage in a sixth-century Chinese history book: “Men should not be satisfied with living like brand new clay roof tiles, but should aspire to be gems even if destined to be shattered to pieces.”
After the Attu defeat, soldiers were told never to suffer the disgrace of being captured alive, and the word gyokusai began to be used to represent battling until the bitter end and dying with honor. The term gained a peculiar nuance in 20th-century wartime Japan.
In 1944, Peleliu Island in the Palau archipelago became an even more dreadful “island of gyokusai.” More than 10,000 Japanese and over 2,000 U.S. soldiers died there. This week’s manga is an ambitious portrayal of the hellish events that took place on a beautiful Pacific island, from the perspective of an individual born generations after the war.
Mangaka Kazuyoshi Takeda made the canny decision to use santoshin (three-head) proportions to depict the characters. The cute-looking characters are a striking contrast to the story’s relentless, and historically accurate, depiction of war. Limbs are blown away by bomb blasts, bodies are charred by flamethrowers, and corpses are piled up like garbage. Such scenes appear page after page.
The protagonist is a Japanese soldier who aspires to be a mangaka. He’s given the special assignment of recording the soldiers’ “last brave deeds of war” to honor their deaths and let their families know of their efforts. Ultimately, his task is very similar to distorting the annihilation of human beings in battles by representing it as gyokusai.
Renowned late mangaka Shigeru Mizuki, a survivor himself, expressed his anger and opposition to war in his autobiographical masterpiece, “So-in Gyokusai-seyo!” (Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths). As time goes on, eventually there will be no figures in the manga industry who can depict the terror of battle based on their own experiences. However, while acknowledging that manga is largely a fictional form, it is possible to convincingly depict images of WWII battlefields by interviewing people who lived through the war, conducting research and using imagination.
The protagonist — an alter ego of Takeda — does his utmost not to die on Peleliu. I believe his efforts to survive encapsulate the real value of this tale.
Takeda is a survivor of a different type of hard-fought battle: He developed testicular cancer at age 35. His record of this experience became his debut manga in 2013, “Sayonara Tama-chan” (Goodbye, my dear ball). I’m sure the experience is not unrelated to the lucid interpretation of life and death that permeates throughout “Peliliu: Guernica of Paradise.”
Ishida is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior specialist whose areas of expertise include manga and anime.
Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise
By Kazuyoshi Takeda (Hakusensha)
In 1943 during World War II, Japanese and U.S. forces fought a battle on Attu Island in the North Pacific, in which nearly all of the 2,600 Japanese soldiers deployed on the island were killed. To glorify their efforts, the term gyokusai (shattered gem) was used.
The expression derives from a passage in a sixth-century Chinese history book: “Men should not be satisfied with living like brand new clay roof tiles, but should aspire to be gems even if destined to be shattered to pieces.”
After the Attu defeat, soldiers were told never to suffer the disgrace of being captured alive, and the word gyokusai began to be used to represent battling until the bitter end and dying with honor. The term gained a peculiar nuance in 20th-century wartime Japan.
In 1944, Peleliu Island in the Palau archipelago became an even more dreadful “island of gyokusai.” More than 10,000 Japanese and over 2,000 U.S. soldiers died there. This week’s manga is an ambitious portrayal of the hellish events that took place on a beautiful Pacific island, from the perspective of an individual born generations after the war.
Mangaka Kazuyoshi Takeda made the canny decision to use santoshin (three-head) proportions to depict the characters. The cute-looking characters are a striking contrast to the story’s relentless, and historically accurate, depiction of war. Limbs are blown away by bomb blasts, bodies are charred by flamethrowers, and corpses are piled up like garbage. Such scenes appear page after page.
The protagonist is a Japanese soldier who aspires to be a mangaka. He’s given the special assignment of recording the soldiers’ “last brave deeds of war” to honor their deaths and let their families know of their efforts. Ultimately, his task is very similar to distorting the annihilation of human beings in battles by representing it as gyokusai.
Renowned late mangaka Shigeru Mizuki, a survivor himself, expressed his anger and opposition to war in his autobiographical masterpiece, “So-in Gyokusai-seyo!” (Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths). As time goes on, eventually there will be no figures in the manga industry who can depict the terror of battle based on their own experiences. However, while acknowledging that manga is largely a fictional form, it is possible to convincingly depict images of WWII battlefields by interviewing people who lived through the war, conducting research and using imagination.
The protagonist — an alter ego of Takeda — does his utmost not to die on Peleliu. I believe his efforts to survive encapsulate the real value of this tale.
Takeda is a survivor of a different type of hard-fought battle: He developed testicular cancer at age 35. His record of this experience became his debut manga in 2013, “Sayonara Tama-chan” (Goodbye, my dear ball). I’m sure the experience is not unrelated to the lucid interpretation of life and death that permeates throughout “Peliliu: Guernica of Paradise.”
Ishida is a Yomiuri Shimbun senior specialist whose areas of expertise include manga and anime.
- August 21, 2017
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