Week Four: Documentary Manga (I Saw It + Disaster Drawn)

I personally have always been a fan of Documentary Manga, as I feel like they have a lot to offer, despite generally being graphic in nature and sometimes purposely hard to stomach. I always think it is important to incorporate history in creative mediums when possible, as it allows what happened to be understood more clearly, and in a way offers us a chance to learn and grow from it.

I know that a lot of people typically turn away or are upset over reading about difficult topics, but reading I Saw It by Keiji Nakazawa in class was definitely worthwhile. Even though we have been taught about the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan, I don't think its impact really hit any of us personally as we did not live through the events. We know that these events are bad and that many, many people were affected, but it's definitely a different feeling actually having some sort of visuals to go along with it all. Reading I Saw It was pretty eye-opening and powerful, as it graphically described and depicted events that took place during the time, and instead of just reading about what happened, we were in a way thrown into that world and forced to visualize it with our own eyes, even if only in comic form. In a way, that's what makes documentary manga so powerful; it has always been about some sort of topic that actually happened in real life, and serves as a reminder of the past and for the future, in order to not repeat detrimental history.

Hillary Schrute's paper, Disaster Drawn, goes into Nakazawa's experiences in more written detail, making the manga that much more impactful upon second read. The realization that Nakazawa only lived because of a wall he happened to be standing by, that he was forced to watch his entire world shift without much warning and having to bury his own family is all very harrowing and devastating to think about. Seeing the suffering spilled out through pictures definitely gets the message across and helps give us that sense of shame for even considering nuclear weaponry as an option.