Blind Faith: Edu-Manga: Helen Adams Keller by Sozo Yanagawa and Rie Yagi

When she was 1 ½ years old Helen Keller became very ill and lost both her sight and hearing. Her mother taught her to make gestures to explain what she wanted, but when she was five her mother had another baby. Baby Mildred took up a lot of Mother’s time, and Helen became upset. With no way to communicate her thoughts, all she could do is tantrum. One day she almost hurt the baby in a fit of temper, and so her parents took her to a doctor they hoped could help her. He sent them to meet Alexander Graham Bell. Her parents were surprised, because he was known as the man who had recently invented the telephone. He invented it during part of his real work, which was helping people who could not hear by teaching them to speak. He suggested a tutor from a school from a school for the blind. With the help of Anne Sullivan she learned the finger-spell words, and later to speak. She used her words and visited many places. I liked the drawings and I would read it again. The story was a nice true story that everybody can enjoy and learn the lesson that you can do what you have your heart set on, as long as you try your best always and are willing to accept help from others who can show you the way.

The drawings were very detailed, and it was very easy to see the way people lived back when Helen Keller was alive. It was a bit different from now, as things like the telephone were brand new and they did not have computers so to talk to people far away, so you often had to take very long trips, sometimes around the world. This did not stop Helen from going, and she even went to Japan just like I want to someday. It has inspired me to keep working hard to make my own dreams come true. If Helen Keller, who was blind, deaf, and at first could not even speak, could write books, graduate from university, and travel the world to give speeches and talks to people about her life and what she learned from her struggles, then I can surely reach my own goals too. It also taught me the value of true friendship, as Anne and Helen remained friends until the day they died, helping each other and sharing good times and bad. It was also fun to read as we visit Helen with Astroboy, and his sister, who ask questions that get answered in side notes, so anything hard is explained in a way that is simple to understand.   I think everyone should read this book, and I would like to thank Yoko at Digital Manga Publishing for helping my mother find this book for me to read.

Rating:

Frankly, It’s All About Anne

I am a big believer in children being introduced to the personal lives of key people in history, so that they are not only familiar with the contributions to world society that person made and be inspired, but also to put a human face they can relate to for the era in history that person inhabits. It makes history personal. The problem is not so much that the “important” people are not well known, but that accessible material about them geared to children is hard to find, and by accessible, I mean entertaining in a way that while the facts are presented, the child actually wants to use the material. Now, my kids are like most kids. They LOVE cartoons and comic books as much as the next kid, and it is probably not a huge surprise given my own reading tastes, that they have a love of Japanese graphic novels in particular.
It was therefore with great interest that one day while browsing Digital Manga’s website, I came across the Edu-manga series. I asked the sales office rep about these titles, and she helped me source all five of the titles they had published. They have not been reprinted, but stocks are readily available via Amazon, Play.com, and other manga specialists, so not that difficult to get your hands on. I admit I had some trepidation on this matter. Firstly, these are COMICS. Now, I have read plenty of manga, and I know they can be quite serious in tone, and indeed, in Japan, many manuals and such are even produced in this format. I was not concerned about the format itself, but the fact that being aimed at kids, maybe it was dumbed down in some way. My second concern was that these were written originally in Japanese for the Japanese market, then translated, so what , for example, would their “take” be on European events? I decided they must be fairly balanced views and not overly dumbed down, else an American publishing house would not have gone to all the expense of licensing and translating it, so having the books sourced for me, I happily awaited their arrival.

As it happens, the first book we decided to look at was about Anne Frank. I was particularly interested in this one because Anne Frank’s diary moved me deeply when I first read it as a child of 12. My daughter is not quite nine, so not old enough to really understand a lot of emotions and the finer dirty details of the life Anne lived. I did think though that Anne Frank was a person I wanted my children to know, preferably before being assigned her diary as an educational read a few years down the line, so that as we studied events from WW II, they had that personal “face” of a real person to put on that time frame. Here, the children were being placed on trains and sent way to homes far away to escape the bombs, but there, children were herded onto trains for a darker different purpose, and families fled to secret homes to attempt an escape a fate worse than the possibility of a random bomb drop. This is the reality of Anne, who nonetheless hoped, laughed and dreamed in the way every young girl has. This was the persona that my daughter and son could identify with, whose emotions they could feel, to completely understand what it was like in those dark days. Well, they could, if it was presented in a way they could understand.

So how did this fare? Well, not only were we enchanted by the presentation, but even I learned something. Rated for all ages, it has a reading level suitable for the 8 and above range, but a talented 6 or 7 year old could read it with minor assistance, as the vocabulary is not overly complicated, and while the subject matter is about a terribly violent and cruel period of our recent history, it is not explicit in its depictions though I would recommend being to hand as it is a story that will well the eyes with tears. The chapters are short and sandwiched between them are brief Q and A sections that explain key facts that may puzzle young readers. Astro Boy (yes, THAT Astro Boy) and his sister Uran are visiting their friend who is a professor. Uran has heard that a young girl became famous because she wrote a diary, and that young girl’s name is Anne Frank. The professor says he knows about Anne, and takes the young pair to the Japanese city of Kobe as it has an important place related to Anne Frank, and that there , they can learn more about her.

What? Kobe, Japan? Just what does the city of Kobe have to do with a young Austrian girl who was killed by the Nazis in Europe? I didn’t know either, and was fascinated by the answer. You see, Anne’s diary touched so many, and her place in history has been that human face I spoke of earlier. The one that represents the nonsensical ruin of a life of so many innocents who suffered during that terrible time. A time that the Japanese see as one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, and so, in Kobe, they have built a church in her honour, complete with a statue of Anne and a memorial rose garden: Nishinomiya Anne’s Rose Church . Now, I know Anne was Jewish, but the Japanese built this after consulting with Anne’s father and his approval. Today, schoolchildren from Japan and tourists from around the world stop here while visiting the prefecture, and pay their respects to the memory of Anne Frank, to learn her story, and to etch in their hearts the need to never forget the terrible true price of genocide and war. So, it is very fitting that our two young Japanese friends visit here with professor, and begin to learn about the life of an ordinary young woman who came to symbolise a lost generation.

The biographical part starts out with Anne’s birth,and her parents are snapping photos of the newborn with her sister. We are treated to vignettes of ordinary life, interspersed with the intrusion of the ugliness that was to spread. People wearing armbands suddenly shouting “Juden” and smashing shop windows. A panel with Anne’s father explaining the bad things they see, followed by a panel showing Hitler poised in that infamous salute, with the explanation rolling over. Anne grows up, starts school, the family moves, and things move onwards, steadily advancing to the terrible reality that was the attic, and their subsequent discovery by the Nazis, and the camp that followed. We see all of this, and while it is a lot of information for a graphic novel of only 168 pages, it is more than enough to tell us the story of Anne’s life. This is not meant to replace the famous Diary, but to talk about who Anne was, how she came to write it, how she died, and why the world holds her diary so close to its collective heart. In fact, it drums home (without browbeating) that the Diary of Anne Frank is a must read.

With the strategically placed Q and A sections between chapters, children have many questions answered that would likely confuse them, as it did Astro Boy and Uran. Questions like, “Why did the Nazis decide to persecute the Jews?”, “What kind of place was a concentration camp?” , and “Does the Secret Annex where Anne lived still exist?”. In addition, thanks to this being a graphic novel following Anne and her sister as they too question what they see happening about them, readers are treated to the explanations given them by Anne’s parents. This makes the time period more understandable in an unartificial way as well as acting to bind young readers’ personal experience as an “eyewitness” as they stand virtually beside Anne and see and hear this themselves. I quite like how it managed to explain the Holocaust in ways that would not engender horrific nightmares in the young, and the way it depicted the happenings without demonising the people of an entire country.

The end of the book is another wealth of information that parents and teachers can make great use of. It has a small section explaining how Anne’s father came to publish the diary, followed by another section that contains four short biographies of people who “dedicated themselves to Anne’s Dream and world peace”. Admittedly, these people probably did not know Anne at the time, but nonetheless, they shared the same dream. The first person is Anne’s father, which is quite fitting. The next name on the list did not surprise me, and I was really happy to see a mention of him in a children’s book as the only other book (or film for that matter) that I know of is definitely not one to show children: Oskar Schindler. The next two names did surprise me, I had to admit I had NEVER heard of them (hangs head in shame). Chiune Sugihara, anyone?

Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese ambassador who saved over 6,000 Jews and their families, at the cost of his job, poverty, and even later, arrest by the Russians Today, these Jews have over 80,000 descendants and Sugihara is named amongst the Righteous in Israel.

Yes, when the majority of us think of the second world war and the Japanese, we usually and rather unfairly only think of Pearl Harbour, Iwo Jima, and such, right? That is only half of the story though, as Sugihara-san proves. In 1940, this man was the Japanese consular from Japan to Lithuania. There, he used his position to issue upwards of 6000 entry visas for Japan to fleeing Jews before the Japanese government stopped him. Yes, that is more than Schindler, isn’t it? But nobody made a movie or wrote a novel about him, though perhaps they should. I think it would be fascinating, as he worked sandwiched between the Emperor of Japan and his government as they fought the Allies, and the advancing Nazis on the other, with a tide of desperate humanity looking for someone to help them.

The last one is someone else with ties to Japan, though he was an Austrian, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Austrian scientist who put forward the idea that became the modern EU. He was born in Tokyo to his Japanese mother, who was married to the Austrian minister to Japan. He first put this idea forth during the war years, but had to flee Austria once the Germans occupied it, surfacing in the USA, and returning to Europe after the war to push his idea of a Pan European state, one where each nation would have a voice and listen to others, in a hope that war once more would not ravage Europe. Regardless of what one thinks of the modern EU, having it put into perspective like that makes one take stock, and maybe to want to kick some people for straying from ideals. Ahem..

Coudenhove-Kalergi, who dreamed up the idea of the EU , hoping to prevent more war and genocides from occurring.

The last little detail this gem has is a time line. Now, I really love how this was done. It has three columns, so that one can see events in tandem at a glance. The first column follows Anne’s life, the second the political events in Europe, while the third shows what happened in Japan, the US and elsewhere around the world at the same time. It keeps to just key points as otherwise it would be unwieldy, but it makes for an excellent resource to cross reference with other study materials on down the line. With its larger print, bigger than average art panels, and simpler language, this is sure to engage to the attention of a child being introduced to it and they certainly will come away from it knowing more about WW II and Anne Frank than they did going in. This is not to say that this won’t have some possible hiccups with some western users though.

The first issue is minor. This is “native manga”, so you will have to introduce the uninitiated in the proper way to read it. That is, the “back cover” is actually the “front”, and you read the panels right to left. It is not difficult however, and the last page of the book actually has a pictorial guide to aid the unwary. The second quibble is the paper quality, It’s almost like newsprint and is off-white. So, what I am saying is, it feels a bit cheap, and ham handed kids very well may rip the pages. It is no worse quality than most kids’ cheap paperback books though, so as long as you make sure they know how to properly treat a book, you’ll be okay. It is a slight disappointment, however, as it being educational material, you would think they might go a bit more upmarket with the paper to encourage schools and libraries to stock it, as multiple children would be handling it. It is not enough though to take away a star, so I’ll just be done with mentioning it and leave it at that. Having captured the interest of my 8 year old daughter so that she is taking the rest of the series from the shelf and devouring them without any further encouragement from me, they more than make up for such a small matter.

Anne's Rose Church's memorial rose garden in Japan. The roses are "Souvenir d'Anne Frank" variety, and were donated by Otto Frank himself.

Rating: