Shigeru mizuki biography samples
•
Review by Karl Verhoven
Shigeru Mizuki&#;s combined history of the Showa era () and his autobiography continues with an extremely compressed period. In terms of the sheer work involved and information imparted is every bit the equal of its impressive predecessor, but it&#;s less engaging overall.
Mizuki comments on the political and military decisions via his stand-in Nezumi Otako, one of his characters known throughout Japan, and this commentary is contentious in a nation where the respect for tradition and office prevails. Such is his artistic standing, though, he&#;s able to do so from his own position as a recognised “Master”.
“Even the children of Japan yearn for war against the West”, advised General Hideki Tojo, Prime Minister from , “we must give the people what they want.” Japanese tactics of surprise attacks by air and sea initially ensured victories throughout the Asian region. Such was the rapidity of this territorial gain that the head of Naval Intelligence procla
•
War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki Shigeru
War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki Shigeru
Matthew Penney
Many Japanese neonationalists contend that it is “masochistic” to look critically at the nation’s wars of the s and s. They assume that criticism of Japanese militarism and love of the country and its traditions are somehow mutually exclusive. In place of an honest look at past crimes, revisionists present Japan as a victim, originally of Western imperialism, and now of a conspiracy of defamation by its neighbors.
Manga artist Mizuki Shigeru (b. ), creator of the famous supernatural series GeGeGe no Kitaro, is one individual who could not be blamed for feeling like a victim. A veteran of the fighting in the South Pacific, Mizuki was felled by malaria and lost his left arm in an American air raid. He suffered life-long health effects from the abuse he endured as a new recruit. Mizuki, however, has not slipped into a comfortable “victim’s view” of the
•
“In our military, soldiers and socks were consumables; a soldier ranked no higher than a cat,” the Japanese manga artist Shigeru Mizuki recalled in the afterword to his haunting illustrated Second World War memoir, “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths.” “But when it came to death, it seems we were human beings after all.”
By all rights, Mizuki (born Mura) should not have died on November 30th at the age of ninety-three, from complications of a fall. He should have perished in , when, incapacitated by malaria in a field hospital on the Pacific island of Rabaul, his left arm was mangled in an Allied bombing run. The shredded limb was amputated bygd the facility’s sole sjukvårdare, an optometrist by training, without anesthetic. It was the coup de grâce for an altogether miserable experience that Mizuki chronicled again and again in his works.
In Japan, Mizuki is an icon for his long-running comic and animation series “GeGeGe no Kitaro,” which debuted on television in and continues in various fo