History 2 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

History 2 - Essay Example .The protagonist Gen is a small boy whose family lives in Hiroshima during the 1940’s.Like most of the Japanese families, it is a patriarchal family , where all the family members honor and obey the words of the father. Gen’s father, who has understood the futility of war, is against it. This makes the family unpopular in the town. The book shows the blind loyalty of the Japanese to their Emperor. It was this mistaken sense of loyalty which made them turn against anybody talking about the evils of war. The Japanese had a sense of honor which made them commit suicide in stead of finding practical solutions to the problems that faced them. Gen’s father disapproved of this warped sense of values of his people. But his opposition to war was not supported by the others who regarded him as a traitor. The second volume tells us about what happened immediately after the Bomb was dropped. . â€Å"The city of Hiroshima had disappeared, buried under cries of pain and piles of corpses† (Nakazawa p.4) The drawings of the dying Japanese with the flesh of their bodies oozing out is very disturbing, even though it is in black and white The hands of the victims, stiff and curled as if grasping at an ephemeral hope, tell their tale better than any words. Then there is the heartrending scene of the little girl Setsuko of first grade, who , while dying, requests Gen to tell her parents that she â€Å"died here† (p.2) Gen echoes the despairing cry of the nation as a whole, when he says, â€Å"everything is gone†¦everything has disappeared. What will become of us?† (p.7) The spirit of Gen’s father tells him to survive and take care of his mother. Here too, Gen echoes the will of the Japanese people, when he decides to survive. The sight of the bodies lying everywhere, and the cry for water of the dying confronted Gen when he goes to look for some rice for his mother, so that his infant sister