I Saw It

I Saw It
Cover of Educomics release of I Saw It.
おれは見た (Ore wa Mita)
Genre	Drama, Biography, Anti-war
Manga
Written by	Keiji Nakazawa
Published by	Shueisha, Holp Shuppan
English publisher	NA Educomics
Demographic	Shōnen
Magazine	Weekly Shōnen Jump
Published	October, 1972

I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor's True Story, titled Ore wa Mita (おれは見た^?) in Japanese, is a one-shot manga by Keiji Nakazawa that first appeared in 1972 as a 48-page feature in the magazine Monthly Shōnen Jump, which at the time was a spin-off issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump. The story was later published in a collection of Nakazawa's short stories by Holp Shuppan. I Saw It is a biographical piece following the life of Nakazawa from his youngest days in post-war Hiroshima, up until his adulthood. I Saw It became the predecessor for Nakazawa's popular manga series Barefoot Gen.

The volume was released in North American in a colorized English translated volume by Educomics under the title I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor's True Story in 1982.

In 1945, elementary student Keiji Nakazawa's mother wakes him up during an air raid and they rushed into a wet shelter. Hungry and with there being little food, Keiji would steal and eat raw rice from storage bins. To earn money, the family painted wooden clogs. His father also did traditional Japanese paintings and his brother Yasuto welded the hulls of ships at the Kure Shipyard. Keiji's brother, Shoji, left during a group evacuation, keeping in touch through letters. On August 6, 1945, on his way to school, Keiji saw a B-29 flying overhead. At 8:15 am, it dropped an atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, on Hiroshima. Keiji was knocked unconscious. The schoolyard wall had blocked most of the flames from the blast, though his cheek was impaled by a nail in a wooden board. Keiji returned to his home to learn that his mother, who had recently given birth to a baby girl, was waiting for him by the tracks on Yamaguchi Street. The rest of his family, except Yasuto, had just died. Their house had collapsed in the blast, and the father and children were trapped under the wreckage. Meanwhile, a fire had started elsewhere, but quickly spread from house to house, so the father and children were burned alive while pinned down, and while the mother listened to their screams. Later on, Keiji and Yasuto went back to their home to dig up their family's bodies.