The Image Narrative - Research Paper Example

“Manga artist Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922), creator of the famous supernatural series GeGeGe no Kitaro, is one individual who could not be blamed for feeling like a victim.”1 In fact, Shigeru lost his left arm in the war but sees himself, it seems, reflected through his art in the way that the war was torturous and terrible. The key players in the text include Japanese officials, as well as one character we see throughout the panels. They are both parodied, and the character guiding one through the panels who is the main character acts as though he knows nothing about WWII.

The cartoon character which is parodied in the panel definitely adds to the overall tone of the piece, giving War and Japan a slightly humorous bent, although little about War and Japan is really humorous. The topic of the cartoon is carnage, massacre, disaster, and war—at their worst. The suffering of the Japanese people is aptly portrayed in this graphic cartoon, bringing the reader to a very dark place. In this sense, it is understood why the cartoon is offensive to some people, both to the Japanese and those who are not Japanese.

This cartoon disturbs the reader, but with an overall intent to educate—not just to shock. That is the redeeming value of this cartoon, is that it seeks to educate its readers about the horrors of war as it relates to Japanese history, pre- and post-World War II. This cartoon exemplifies the suffering of the Japanese in different eras, that is supposed to enlighten the reader as to why the Japanese have a certain mindset regarding the war and its effects. III. Second Set of Questions (150 words) Images echo each other in this piece in the sense that violence mirrors itself continually through the piece, not only talking about the Nanking Massacre—but contrasting that with the atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima and the carnage that resulted in that.

Not only that but, we see the overlap and evolution of soldiers having been sent off to the South Pacific and Burma from Japan to fight in WWII, an often unseen added element about the War that Shigeru sheds light upon. The images are fixed in terms of being frozen in time, but there is definitely a sense of movement in the images, giving oneself an idea that it is like watching a little movie of World War II from a Japanese viewpoint. The images are more ambiguous when it comes to larger overviews, like the Nanking Massacre and one jungle scenes seen later in the panel. IV. Third Set of Questions (600 words) Sensory stimulation is paramount to War and Japan.

The rhythm and pacing is switched up. At first, Shigeru shows us graphic images, and then gives our eyes a rest between graphic images to process what we have just seen, and then the cartoon character narrator tries to explain what is going on in the mind of ordinary Japanese people, bringing the reader back to a sense of normalcy—right before the next image is proffered on-screen. The larger pattern of movement overall is a wax and wane, bringing us in peaks and valleys to a crescendo of realizing what it means to be a true Japanese—to “stand tall.

” In this way, the progression from panel to panel is very cyclical, nonlinear, and evocative of an emotional rollercoaster in which Shigeru engages us. The turning point of the entire “cartoon,” if it can be called that—since one usually thinks of cartoons as more humorous than grotesque—is the massacre that occurs after the Manchu people are worked like slaves