Showa Era #3: The Sino-Japanese War

‘Expansion, or colonialism if you prefer to call it that. It begins with lofty slogans soaring on their wings through the sky, and ends in a bitter reality that words cannot describe.’ So begins this volume, as Japan pushes deep into Asia and occupies its cities one after another, from Malaysia to Singapore and from Hong Kong to the Philippines. And, as with every occupation, it begins by conquering hearts: Japan courts the peoples and leaders of the Asian nations, sometimes with the lure of the hoped-for ‘Asian prosperity’, sometimes with intimidation by Japan’s crushing military might. Here arises the question that recurs through the ages: what is the meaning of treason? And here appears Mizuki, a young man striving in these conditions to earn his daily bread and fulfil himself, but the winds do not blow as the ships wish: life surprises him with events that completely change his course, and he finds himself in new circumstances he neither understands nor knows the reason for, losing his sense of ambition and his outlook on the future, and seeing the world as he never saw it before. Shigeru Mizuki: in 1965 he won the 6th Kodansha Children’s Manga Award for ‘Mr. Television’, published in Bessatsu Shonen magazine; in 1991 he received the Medal of Honour; in 2003 he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, and in the same year the Shigeru Mizuki memorial museum opened in his hometown of Sakaiminato; in 2007 the French edition of ‘NonNonBa’ won the Grand Prize at the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France; in 2008 the French edition of ‘Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths’ won the festival’s Heritage Prize; in 2010 Shigeru Mizuki was named a Person of Cultural Merit.