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Cartoon is Navy’s envoy to anxious Japan

Damage Controlman 3rd Class Jack O’Hara is a bumbler. On his first sea tour aboard the carrier George Washington, O’Hara is seasick, gets lost, gets chewed out for showing up late to his work center, kills his shins on the knee-knockers, and, when he runs to the wrong space during a general quarters drill, a supervisor tells him he’s just been “killed.” He has to play a corpse for the rest of the evolution.

But O’Hara isn’t just any novice sailor on his first deployment. He’s the Navy’s fictional ambassador to the people of Japan, starring in a Japanese-style comic book, known as “manga,” designed to introduce the nuclear-powered George Washington to an uneasy nation that until now has hosted only conventionally powered carriers.

The George Washington is scheduled to take over late this summer for the oil-fueled Kitty Hawk as 7th Fleet’s forward-deployed carrier, and commanders commissioned the comic “Manga CVN 73” to introduce the new ship.

Unveiled June 8 by Naval Forces Japan, “Manga CVN 73” was a hit in manga-mad Japan, where 800 people lined up around the block outside Fleet Activities Yokosuka to pick up their free comics, produced in kanji and English editions.

Command spokesman Cmdr. David Waterman said that using the manga format was crucial to reaching the Japanese.

“The most-read, most-used medium is manga — not TV, not radio, not the Internet. Manga is a traditionally read, heavily sold medium in this country,” Waterman said. “We went, OK, there you go, the Japanese people have given us the way to talk to them.”

Naval Forces Japan hired artists Harumi Sato and Hiroshi Kazusa to draw the comic, which had a total printing of 24,000 copies and cost about $72,000, Waterman said. Sato and Kazusa were on hand June 8 autographing copies of the book.

Although the Navy-funded manga is a first, the Japanese government often uses comics to get messages out to young people. The Japanese Self-Defense Force, for example, publishes a manga that features a saucer-headed imp named Prince Pickles, who tags along with Japanese soldiers and sailors to learn about their jobs.

For the U.S. government’s first foray into the medium, Waterman said he wanted “Manga CVN 73” to appeal mostly to Japanese readers, so O’Hara was written as half-Japanese, having been raised in Kentucky and visiting Japan for the first time to see grandparents he’s never met. The book also includes many recognizable geographical details of Japan.

“We tried to put in as many lodestones, as many touchable realities, as possible, almost like ‘The Da Vinci Code’; you can walk through Japan with this book and walk on Jack’s path,” Waterman said.

For American, readers, the English translation of “Manga CVN 73” conveys its meaning, but a little less elegantly than it probably does in the original.

In one example, when O’Hara reports to the damage control center, he describes his job: “Should the vessel become damaged in case of an accident or battle, the damage control team minimizes the damage through immediate fire containment and securing water leakage, while providing aid to the crew.”

As he worked on the story, Waterman asked for opinions from small panels of American sailors and local Japanese. Sailors told him about their initial experiences in the fleet, which led to the subplots of O’Hara’s early travails. And the Japanese helped Waterman with understanding thematic elements that wouldn’t necessarily stick out to an English-speaking audience.

“For example, if Jack steals a hamburger from the mess deck, does that make him a thief?” Waterman asked. “Another thing was, do his grandparents accept him? That is a true cultural fear of young children here: Will they accept them? These are things I wouldn’t ever have clued into as an American. There’s another part where they’re washing their money — I wouldn’t ever have been able to come up with that cultural nugget out of my brain.”

(Tradition holds that if you wash your money at a certain Kamakura shrine, you’ll double it.)

Still, Internet manga fans, wary of the U.S. government’s entry into the medium, have dubbed the comic “propa-manga.” And in addition to a diplomatic overture, the release of “Manga CVN 73” became an eerie example of life imitating art: In the story, O’Hara has to learn the ropes of fighting shipboard fires during a general quarters drill, and then later, he discovers a real fire in the ship’s laundry — which he puts out himself. Of course, the real-life George Washington had a major fire May 22, which injured 24 crew members and delayed its changing places with the retiring carrier Kitty Hawk. Waterman said the fire narrative was just coincidence; the comic had been written and drawn months before.

“Manga CVN 73” does not directly address many of the biggest controversies about the U.S. Navy’s presence in Japan. The comic only makes a passing mention of the George Washington’s nuclear reactors, and aside from the ship’s skipper telling sailors to be “good ambassadors,” the manga doesn’t touch on incidents of sailors and Marines charged with violent crime.

Waterman said NFJ already tries to saturate the Japanese media with messages about nuclear safety and good citizenship, so “Manga CVN 73” focuses on a more fundamental story.

“We wanted to get across the idea that sailors train hard — a lot of the local fears here are, ‘Something may happen and we can’t handle it’ — but the ship can handle it. We wanted to let people know, ‘We live here, too. We’ll take care of it, because this is our backyard as well.’”

Learn more

* Read “Manga CVN 73”