Rating: 3 out of 5
I think I started this altogether some three times before managing to go through it. Partially this was because the electronic version was a right pain to understand: which way to read and pan the title seemed to change from one scene to another. In the end, I managed to push myself through it, but it wasn’t a given.
The premise is very simple—the history of the early Showa through a graphic novel medium —and I really liked the idea! The content was fairly detailed, though the electronic version made accessing footnotes almost impossible. I also liked that the content was (mostly) presented from the point of view of regular people who lived through the events. This made the real impact of events (disasters, coups, assassinations, etc) much more vivid.
I was especially keen about this as I understood there are sequels to this one, with only the start of the Showa. The story ends just before the Pacific War, and there must be a lot to go through there, not to mention after this. So I’ve considered getting the paper copies to read that period, as the electronic experience was so bad. But I’ve not got there yet…
