Chiba Pref. ¨C Tadao Tsuge was only 4 when World War II ended. Now 85, memories of that time are still quick to surface, no matter how peaceful the day.
¡°It was daytime. I came out of an air-raid shelter and looked up. A Zero fighter plane was flying while burning,¡± he tells The Japan Times. ¡°That image has stayed with me all my life.¡±
Those memories would shape not only the manga artist¡¯s childhood but the work that followed. One of the leading figures of the gritty movement known as gekiga (literally, ¡°dramatic pictures¡±), Tsuge spent decades chronicling the lives of society¡¯s outsiders, drawing on memories of war, hunger and postwar poverty to create stories grounded in everyday reality.
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