Barefoot Gen Real-life version

I'll only do a few scans and just give my own take on the movie. The version I saw is also all in Japanese with no subtitles. I'm not sure if this is the full version or not, having gotten it off You Tube.

The film starts by showing the Enola Gay and the atomic bomb it carried.

Then it changes to Hiroshima itself.

One of the interesting things it shows is that, in Japan as elsewhere, there were regular families just trying to get by the best they could.

Then they hear an air raid siren.

Then it cuts back to images of the bomber.

Then back to Hiroshima where people are exiting there underground bunkers thinking all the danger is past. The film keeps going back and forth like that at this point.

Then Barefoot Gen sees the Enola Gay. There's some special effects after the bomb goes off and then it goes to what happened after it exploded.

Gen was behind a wall and survived.

He sees a woman dead and then moves on and sees other people alive but suffering.

He finds his mother. His father and his younger brother are trapped in the house. His sister is obviously dead. Then the house catches on fire. (One problem here. The fire can be easily portrayed in an animated version. In this version several boards fall on the house starting the fire but the boards are not terribly big and Gen and his mother could have pulled them away from the house fairly easily and stopped the fire.)

Then its back to a footage of Hiroshima after the bomb, then back to Gen.



Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page