Hope In The Face Of Disaster
On the anniversary of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes takes a look at Tokyopop’s The Guardian Of Fukushima…
Guardian of Fukushima
Writer: Fabien Grolleau
Artist: Ewen Blain
Tokyopop
Guardian of Fukushima is the second in Tokyopop’s series Comics That Matter coming after Peremoha: Victory for Ukraine, an indication that it’s meant as a serious work about a serious subject. Published in time for the 12th anniversary of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and the tsunami that followed, it takes a ground-level human perspective on events that left 20,000 people dead and triggered one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. An ideal viewpoint presents itself via the real-life experiences of Naoto Matsumura, 52 at the time, who chose to stay in his home six miles from the plant in order to care for abandoned animals and pets, and who not only remained unscathed by potential radiation but is still there today carrying on the job.
Written by Fabien Grolleau and drawn by Ewen Blain, and translated here from their French original, the comic is crafted to be poignantly humane rather than terrifying and morbid, with only flashes of animal suffering and mild horror to stand in for the dire annihilation going on close by. Matsumura is drawn as a sweet white-haired family man, usually in farmer’s overalls and boots, a man of the soil and of his land. Portions of myths and local folklore are woven into the story, usually through Matsumura telling the tales to his family or to himself: the earthquakes are caused by Namazu the giant catfish waking up, and the tsunami carries the dragon Ryujin in its surf. Blain draws the tsunami symbolically at first in the style of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, an instantly recognisable image of natural destruction; radiation escaping from the plant is a toxic fog monster, a man-made hazard as unstoppable as any fictional yōkai.
The soft lines and pastel colours are an easy gateway into the emotions of the tale, part of a storytelling style that’s distinctly European rather than Japanese. Only the last chapter, accurately titled This Angry Man, widens outwards from one person’s personal experiences to look instead at the larger question of nuclear power and its risks, and at Matsumura’s subsequent anti-nuclear activism. Japanese manga comics have had a deep and complex relationship with the country’s atomic industry for decades and an even more direct connection with Fukushima for the last twelve years, producing works of both earlier pro-nuclear propaganda and more recent howling outrage, books boiling at a much hotter artistic temperature than Guardian Of Fukushima aims for. But there’s always room for a comic showing simple human decency in the face of absolute catastrophe.
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Hope In The Face Of Disaster On the anniversary of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes takes a look at Tokyopop’s The Guardian Of Fukushima… Guardian of Fukushima Writer: Fabien Grolleau Artist: Ewen Blain Tokyopop Guardian of Fukushima is the second in Tokyopop’s series Comics That Matter coming after Peremoha: Victory for
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