When he was twenty-two years old, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo to pursue a career as a full-time cartoonist. While other children experienced other horrors in their lives, the likes of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created escapism by building the perfect superhero, one who could outrun trains, clear buildings in a single bound, and be invulnerable to bullets. This escapism did not spread to all children of war, however. At the conclusion of the Silver Age of Comics, Keiji Nakazawa detailed in a short story called Oré wa mita (I Saw It), all the various atrocities he witnessed after the bomb dropped on his city. Slowly, he developed his short story into ten 200-page volumes, showing everything from the bombing fallout to what subsequent life in post-war Japan was like for a young, orphaned boy, which he called Hadashi no Gen or Barefoot Gen.