जीवनी

Survivor of the nuclear attack of Hiroshima, Japan. He claims to have seen the Enola Gay flying far overhead, and was nearly blinded by the flash of the explosion, which he described as "like a million flash bulbs going off at once". He credits his survival with a brick wall collapsing on top of him during the blast.

He retired from manga in 2009, and decided to spend his remaining years in his hometown Hiroshima.

Nakazawa's work "Barefoot Gen" is a semi-autobiography, based on his own experiences as an atom bomb survivor.

He had planned to make a sequel to "Barefoot Gen", but health issues brought on by the nuclear bomb (cataracts, lung cancer) meant he had to abandon the idea.

Nakazawa was inspired to become a manga artist from reading Osamu Tezuka's manga "Shin Takarajima".

I drew manga on many subjects: baseball, samurai dramas, racers and so on. So I think I always would have found a career as an artist, in the entertainment world.

In "Okonomi Ha-chan", I depicted a person who makes an effort to live through life from a different angle to Gen. I wanted it to be a powerful piece that would conquer the influence of the Bomb in Hiroshima.

Sometimes, drawing manga, you can become frustrated with the limitations. For example, you might want to show a dramatic action, or a flow of movement, that you simply can't express in a series of frames on a page. Another thing you can have in film is real speech, the sound of the character's voice. And you can add music and sound effects. You can't do those things with manga!

There's so much more that could be told of Gen's story, but now I feel that Gen can best live on in the imagination of the reader.

If it hadn't been for my mother, who knows what would have happened to me. I would've been a war orphan - I'd either be dead or in jail, most likely.