¹ Gen is pronounced with a hard g and a short e, as in again, where the second syllable is pronounced to rhyme with then. Hadashi means barefoot. Hence, “Gen of the Bare Feet.” In the final chapter of this autobiography, Nakazawa explains the origin of the name: “I called the protagonist ‘Gen’ in the sense of the basic composition of humanity so that he'd be someone who wouldn't let war and atomic bomb happen again.” (Gen is the first half of the compound Genso, meaning chemical element.)

² The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, ed. John W. Dower and John Junkerman (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985).

³ “Hiroshima” no kūhaku—Nakazawa-ke shimatsuki (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1987); ‘Hadashi Gen’ no jiden (Tokyo: Misuzu, 1995).

⁴ Nakazawa refers to his mother throughout as Mother/Mom, but on August 6 his father cries out to “Kimiyo.” The manga gives her name as Kimie. In the manga, she calls her husband “Daikichi.”

⁵ Charles Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (New York: Henry Holt, 2010). A New York Times account of the brouhaha that has greeted Pellegrino's book quoted Jeffrey Porter of the University of Iowa, “There's a hazy line between ‘truth’ and invention in creative non-fiction, but good writers don't have to make things up.” Motoko Rich, “Pondering Good Faith in Publishing,” New York Times, March 9, 2010, p. C6. For an extended discussion of the issues involved in this hoax, see my “Misunderstanding Hiroshima,” Japanfocus.org.

⁶ “Barefoot Gen, Japan, and I: The Hiroshima Legacy: An Interview with Nakazawa Keiji,” tr. Richard H. Minear, International Journal of Comic Art 10, no. 2 (fall 2008): 311–12. An excerpt from this interview is an appendix to this book.

⁷ Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima, 325. Without footnotes, without a list of interviewees and the dates of the interviews, Pellegrino's assertions are impossible to evaluate and hence virtually worthless. At best, those survivor accounts are sixty-year-old memories of the event, and intervening events and experiences have played a major, if undocumented, role.

⁸ This ditty was a take-off on the “Battleship March,” which had the syllable mo twice in its opening line. Imo is the Japanese word for potato.