Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki is a resource most appropriate for older high school students. The manga is a semiautobiographical account of Mizuki's World War II service in New Guinea. Teachers should be aware of content that might not be appropriate for younger or less mature students. The manga does include mature themes and scenes including violence, suicide, partial nudity, and prostitution. Teachers should be aware of this before assigning the manga. Given this, however, a teacher could choose to use short excerpts.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is an anti-war piece that could easily, in an ELA class, accompany All Quiet on the Western Front and, with elements of irony and futility of war, is a good partner for Catch-22. In a Social Studies classroom, excerpts from OTOND would provide excellent contrast to Western depictions of WWII-era Japan. Western portrayals focus on kamikaze attacks, blind loyalty to the emperor, and, decades after the war, still lack humanization of the Japanese people. OTOTND breaks down those stereotypes and brings a common humanity to the protagonists. The soldiers in OTOND aimlessly wander the jungle, suffer from malaria and ringworm, are attacked several times by enemy forces, officers are killed, soldiers are killed, and yet the protagonists continue to push towards a questionably "noble" end without surrender. Mizuki's work captures the futility of war and directs readers to question the "nobility" of any death. Characters are stuck with their officers' direction to push forward despite all obstacles while the doctor struggles to maintain the group's sense of humanity and reality. The doctor remarks that no humans should be subject to the troops' current condition. When the doctor dies, one soldier comments symbolize the complete loss of humanity: "We needed him." OTOND ends with a powerful, realistic illustrations of human bones and bodies in the jungle of New Guinea. How "noble" can death be if all deaths are all ultimately bones and dust?

I really enjoyed reading Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and plan to use excerpts in my classroom soon.

This book was written by the acclaimed manga artist and author Shigeru Mizuki. Mizuki's own PTSD and alarming experiences as a Japanese soldier in the pacific front of WWII are expressed through this graphic novel. While the format of the book - read from right to left and drawn in manga format - is unique and provides an experience like no other depiction of these horrible tales of human tragedy, the content is most definitely rated "R." Mizuki portrays the role of the so-called 'comfort women' near stationed Japanese soldiers on pacific atolls, uses profane language, and discusses at length the diseases and petrifying deaths suffered by these young men. It's not pleasant, though this should come as no surprise given the book's title and topic. For instructors, reading this book may help to humanize the soldier's experience, particularly in this case where war had made Japanese and Americans enemies. However, it is unlikely this book would be of particular use in even the high school classroom due to its graphic nature. There are a few snippets that might be useful, such as the lyrics of traditional soldier songs included in the very beginning of the book, but the book as a whole is too graphic for class discussion. It might be more practical to consider another of Mizuki's works, or to conduct a discussion as to why a Japanese soldier would choose to express his memories of the war through graphic novel rather than traditional text-only format. This might also lead to a discussion of Japanese culture in which one might be able to surmise that the use of a graphic novel might have allowed Mizuki to 'save face' rather than to allow the reader's imagination to envision the tragedies described in the novel. An exploration of Mizuki himself as a symbol of Japanese popular culture as a famed comic artist would be meaningful as well - in fact, his obituary in the New York Times proves a great starting point.