Ai ni Iku yo

On the 11th march 2011, an earthquake in Japan caused a tsunami that in turns damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Being the largest nuclear incident since Chernobyl, it had extremely severe consequences that still have impact today. Nobumi, father of two kids, living in Tokyo and popular author of children’s books, was shocked when he saw the extent of the damage on TV and decided to come help the victims and write a travel book named “Ue wo Muite Aruko!” based on his observations as a volunteer to make people aware of the situation and raise money for them. Ai ni Iku Yo is an adaptationof this book created by Georges morikawa who had spent 22 years working on Hajime no Ippo without any side project. After reading Nobumi’s book and having also worked as a volunteer, he asked Nobumi if he could make a manga out of it to have a greater impact. After having felt the damage of the earthquake, Nobumi’s first reaction was to gather books from different authors and send it to to kids in Fukushima to help them forget for moment the suffering they’re living through. The problem is, after gathering 4000 books, he received a lot of backlash on his blog, be it insults or even death threats for being insensitive and doing unnecessary actions to put himself in a good light in time of crisis. In spite of all of this, he finally decides to make a real impact and go along on a charity work to help people directly on site with other people from the show business. That’s how this whole experience happened and most of the story focuses on him with his naïve view of the situation and with zero experience, confronted to despair in seeing how huge the wastes are and the misery of the people. There he will be tasked to clean a retirement home that has been flooded and mixed with excrements and trash and to find personal objects of the victims that got mixed into it. He will be also asked to clean a boat that got embed into a house, burying the corpses of cats and dogs that got killed, giving food to the refugees, building a dam to avoid some areas getting flooded again, organizing plays to entertain kids,… One thing you could be afraid of is the manga indulging in misery porn and being self complaisant, and while it isn’t really far from being the case, Georges Morikawa manages to be subtle enough for it not to become a problem. For anyone that has ever read Ippo can see that he has a talent to make us feel empathy for the characters and properly conveying the hardships that his characters are going though. I also feel part of this can also easily be excused by the very nature of the work, as it was created to support victims and raise money for them, so certain elements are idealized, including how the main character, Nobumi, is portrayed : benevolent without a fault and lamenting over how pointless his presence is which can feel hindering the plot at times. Nonetheless this part is overshadowed by the positive energy that the characters give off, doing their best and giving all their energy to make people even so slightly happier. It’s also interesting to note that a lot of other artists from the weekly shounen magazine have helped Morikawa to the elaboration of this manga by drawing side characters into the story, among them are Ken Akamatsu, Mitsuro Kubo, Koji Seo, Hideo Nishimoto, Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Hiro Mashima, Kazuki Yamamoto, Miki Yoshikawa and Makoto Raiku. In most cases, their style don’t really denote with the rest and leave very little impact as they just serve for little cameos, the only one that really stood out for me was Fukumoto that kept his unique and raw style really fitting for showing the harshness of these life conditions.