50 Years After Argentina’s Coup: New Comic Explores the Life of Poet Juan Carlos Higa Akamine, Missing Since 1977

Original article: A 50 años del golpe en Argentina: Presentan historieta sobre el poeta hijo de japoneses, Juan Carlos Higa Akamine (Hiroshi), secuestrado y desaparecido en 1977

Fifty years after the military coup in Argentina, writer and lawyer Julián Axat has created a comic using Artificial Intelligence resources, based on the unpublished poems of Juan Carlos Higa Akamine (Hiroshi), a poet of Japanese descent who was kidnapped and disappeared in 1977.

From Argentina, Axat notes that a single poem by Hiroshi, titled «To Stay in Everyone,» was published in the book Palabra Viva (2007), an anthology released by the Argentine Society of Writers (SEA). The poem reads as follows:

To Stay in Everyone

If I were named Juan tenderness
everything would be different…
I would cease to be me to be everyone
a halfway goal among the kids
a gentle openness among pigeons
a heart in the sun
and an infallible something
covering the morning.
However, I am just Juan Carlos
and that is not enough for me to stay
in everyone.

The Argentine writer explains that the idea of reviving Hiroshi’s poetry emerged from a conversation with writer Jorge Boccanera: «We began discussing Roberto Santoro, a well-known poet and journalist who disappeared during the last military dictatorship.»

«Then (Boccanera) casually mentioned the magazine ‘Canto y seña,’ a publication they collaborated on alongside Julio Carmona, Ramiro Infantes, Teodoro Stuchi, Víctor Mazzi, Eduardo Ibarra, Artidoro Velapatiño, and the missing poet Juan Carlos Higa Akamine. ‘A disappeared Japanese poet?’ I asked Boccanera. Exactly, Higa was the only person from the Japanese community who disappeared, and he was a poet,» says Julián Axat.

Thus, based on this lead and Boccanera’s mention, Axat began collecting additional information about Hiroshi, resulting in the comic as «an attempt to narrate the life of this poet, using the rest of his unpublished poems and the support of AI.»

The final work was published in the poetry, politics, and memory magazine El Niño Rizoma (CLICK HERE).

El Ciudadano