- Born
- Died
- Birth nameShigeru Mura
- Nicknames
- Mizuki Shigeru
- Mura Shigeru
- Shigeru Mizuki was born on March 8, 1922 in Sakaiminato, Japan. He was a writer, known for The Great Yokai War (2005), Gegege no Kitaro (2018) and Gegege no Kitarô (1968). He was married to Nunoe Mura. He died on November 30, 2015 in Tokyo, Japan.
- SpouseNunoe Mura(1961 - November 30, 2015) (his death, 2 children)
- His works are mainly about yokai (Japanese monsters and spirits), but he has also done stories about World War 2.
- While in a Japanese field hospital on Rabaul, he was befriended by the local Tolai tribespeople, who offered him land, a home, and citizenship via marriage to one of their women. Mizuki considered remaining behind, but was shamed by a military doctor into returning home to Japan first to face his parents, which he did reluctantly. He returned to Rabaul in 2003 and rekindled his friendship with the natives, who had named a road after him in his honor.
- His wife Nunoe Mura liked him so much she wrote a novel about their life together, Gegege no Nyobo ("Gegege's Wife"), which was adapted into a film and a drama series.
- In the '70s, Mizuki created a "yokai encyclopedia" which is still considered one of the primary resources on the subject.
- In 1942, Mizuki was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army and sent to serve in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. His wartime experiences affected him greatly, as he contracted malaria, watched friends die from battle wounds and disease, and dealt with other horrors of war (not least was constant abuse from superior officers). Finally, in an Allied air raid, he was caught in an explosion and lost his left arm, and had to undergo surgery in the jungle without anesthesia. Incidents like this affected him and made him a lifelong anti-war pacifist.
- Sakaiminato, Mizuki's hometown, has a street dedicated to the ghosts and monsters that appear in his stories. 153 bronze statues of the story's characters line both sides of the road. There is also a museum featuring several of his creations and works.
- In Tottori, where I was first posted, my job was to play the trumpet. I couldn't play it, so I was forced to run around the grounds all the time. It was so tough. I asked my trumpet unit boss how I could be released from the assignment, and he told me to ask the head of the personnel unit. So I went to the personnel unit, and the officer there asked me: "Which would you prefer, South or North?" When I said South, I was sent to Rabaul [then a major Japanese wartime garrison]. If I had played the trumpet without complaining, I could have stayed on in Japan. Because I was a whiner, I was sent overseas.
- Japan should've cool-headedly observed the United States. We didn't have a deep understanding of what the U.S. meant, its national strength, and instead kept our perception vague. We had this weird illusion that we could win the war with just our yamatodamashi [Japanese spirit], paying only a little attention to the material aspects of the war. We were punished for that. The high-ranking officials relied too much on the trivial stuff like spirituality. National strength and material power are much bigger things than that - but we only learned that after losing the war.
- People tend to scorn people who sleep a lot, and we have the expression, damin wo musaboru [literally, "sleep lazily," but actually meaning, "idling your time away"], but that's not good. Sleep is important - for your health, your brain, everything. I slept so much that I kept missing the morning classes in school, but sleeping well and living long is not bad at all.
- When I was little, I didn't do things except things I was interested in. Things that adults would be impressed at seeing, I never did. I would ignore directions from adults, unlike my elder and younger brothers, who listened to them. I missed the first class every day, because I couldn't get up early in the morning. So I scored zero in math tests, because math classes were held the first thing in the morning and I skipped virtually all those classes. So I was called an idiot all the time. Still, I wouldn't listen to what adults said; instead, I carried on doing what I liked - drawing.
- About losing his arm: The moment I was hit, the pain was so fierce that I shrieked - but then the next moment, I forgot everything. People say that when you are bombed, time becomes frozen, and the place turns into a vacuum. Your memory is temporarily lost, and you go into a different world when the bombing takes place right by you.
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