591 Motomiya Hiroshi's The Country Is Burning, Roman Rosenbaum Something about Manchuria arouses strange desires. When I looked at old photographs as sources for this narrative I filt a sense of greed well up inside me. I think that perhaps entrepreneurs, military, farmers and all the people who crossed to Manchuria might have embraced this personal sense of greed arising from the benefit [of moving to Manchuria]. It was perhaps this sense that was betrayed as a pretext for the benefit of the nation (Motomiya and Nakanishi, 1/2003: 193).2 Introducing Baby-boomer Mangaka Motomiya Hiroshi Motomiya Hiroshi is one of Japan's most luminous and successful contemporary comic artists. He was born in Chiba city in Chiba prefecture on June 25, 1947. This makes him a member of the first wave of the Japanese postwar baby-boomer generation (dankai no sedai), which included people born from 1947 to 1949. The historical implications for the first wave ofJapanese baby-boomers are that they were infants during the period of the burnt-out ruins (yakeato) and the black-market period (yami-ichi) in the early days of the postwar. The Greater East Asian conflict was not part of their collective experience and war for this generation meant the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. After graduating from middle school, Motomiya attempted to become a pilot in the self defense force for aeronautics but was discharged at 17 for heart disorder. After this disappointing experience, he aimed to become a manga 3 artist and had his depute in 1965 with Faraway Islands (Tooi Shimakage), which was published by Hinomaru Bunk6 in the magazine Ossu. Motomiya had many successes but became a household name with the manga Salaryman Kintaro which began serialization in 1994 in Weekly Young Jump and ushered in a readership revolution by portraying the white-collar employee or salary man class of urban Japan as the manga's urbane hero. 4 However it was his publication of the historical manga The Countryls Burning that propelled Motomiya into the limelight of domestic criticism. This manga serialization of the Sino-Japanese War (Nicchli Sens6 1937-45) also began its publication in the popular Weekly Young Jump magazine in 2002. Just like most commercially successful weekly serializations, Motomiya's regular feature in the weekly magazine was also turned into a very successful paperback comic book. In a discussion with Nakanishi Rei at the end of the first paperback volume, Motomiya (1/2003:195) acknowledges the explosive nature of the work in terms of that "you can not write such a work [like The Country Is Burning] without embracing the possibility of retirement from active life." IJOCA, Spring 2007