I found Pika-Don to be an incredibly moving and intense story. I was first struck with its depiction of World War II from the Japanese perspective. I haven’t recently read any other books about the war in Japan, so I appreciated that the novel began by showing how the war affected Japan and specifically how demoralizing the Japanese people found the 15-year-long war to be. I was also shocked by the extent of civilian bombings during the war; while one frequently hears of fire-bombings and other attacks on civilians in Europe, it’s somehow still surprising to find that American planes shot up Japanese commercial (non-military) trains. Although the atomic bombs were more widely destructive than any other military method, in some ways they were very consistent with American attacks on Japan during the war, since they targeted civilians and were horribly brutal.

To some extent, it was initially difficult to absorb the information that Pika-Don showed about the actual atomic bomb itself (the first one). To read about the burnt people is one thing, but to see images of them while reading about them is quite another. It’s very disturbing to visually witness the destruction of an atomic bomb, but I think once the reader overcomes the initial shock, there remains a strong anti-war or anti-violence message that gradually sinks in as one continues reading. The medium of graphic narrative is very well-suited to this particular story, because the visual images bring the reader into the direct experience of the story while the textual description provides the informative verbal narrative. Reading Yamaguchi’s memoirs without the images would surely be less moving than reading Pika-Don, which is why the graphic novel is so effective in conveying a strong message to the reader.

Among the specific emotional experiences of Pika-Don was the utter despair felt by the characters, Yamaguchi, Sato, and Iwanaga, after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Before reading the novel, I hadn’t really reflected on the fact that no one knew anything about the atomic bomb prior to the American use of it on Japan. Consequently, the victims of the bomb had no idea what had hit them or how far-reaching its effects had been. I was a bit surprised when Sato and Iwanaga started arguing about the remains of civilization as they made their way to the bomb shelter. Iwanaga’s point that roads don’t exist, houses don’t exist, and people don’t exist really resonated with me as a sign that the bomb seemed to him to mark the end of the world. The three men were blindly trying to find a way out of the nuclear destruction without knowing whether or not there even was an escape. To some extent, their experience (at least for a certain period of time) is identical to the present image of a post-apocalyptic world. They wandered through destroyed streets with burnt corpses on the ground without knowing how much of their country was still intact.

Still more shocking than the extent of destruction in Hiroshima was the frustrating fact that no one in Nagasaki believed Yamaguchi when he told them about the bomb. I suppose their incredulity is to be expected, since no one had personally experienced an atomic bomb before Hiroshima, but it was still astonishing to read about Yamaguchi’s trouble explaining the attack to others. I guess there’s no reason why they should believe something that they’ve never witnessed, but still, their reluctance to accept that such a bomb could exist was initially surprising. I would’ve thought that they might at least have considered the possibility, especially after seeing Yamaguchi’s wounds, but evidently that was not the case. There was a certain tragic irony in the fact that Fukuda was stubbornly denying the existence of the atomic bomb just before it hit Nagasaki and killed him. On a political level, the utter lack of knowledge about the bomb in Hiroshima reveals the extent of American savagery in dropping the second bomb on Nagasaki. Clearly, the Japanese people had no idea what had happened in Hiroshima and were totally unprepared for a similar attack anywhere else in the country. This fact makes the second bombing seem even crueler than it is generally thought to be. Japan barely had time to find out what had happened in Hiroshima, let alone negotiate with America, before America dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. Realizing the total ignorance of the Japanese people regarding the destruction of Hiroshima truly reveals the unconscionable savagery of the American government in creating a second tragedy before Japan could understand the first.