The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington is slated to arrive at her new home port in Yokosuka, Japan, by the end of September with her inbound sea lanes cleared — by a comic book.

An American nuclear-powered warship makes a nice target for protesters because Japan still experiences the "nuclear allergy" that remains from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 63 years ago. The Japanese have gotten over that enough to build 55 nuclear power plants to generate about a third of the country's electricity, but not entirely.

Therefore, the U.S. Navy has produced a comic book that seeks to explain GW's mission, how the crew is trained, and what life is like aboard the 97,000-ton leviathan. It is intended to persuade the Japanese public around Yokosuka that the two nuclear reactors aboard GW, which is replacing the oil-powered Kitty Hawk, will be operated safely.

The Navy chose the comic book, called "manga" in Japanese, to make its case because manga may well be the most pervasive form of communication in Japan. They are everywhere, read by white-collar "salarymen," shopkeepers and sales ladies, and middle-school boys and girls riding the trains, subways and buses all over the country.

The magazine-size books feature everything from classics to romances to crime novels. The Navy produced 25,000 copies of the GW manga at a cost of $3 apiece to be handed out free and they were snapped up in hours by Japanese who waited in long lines in Yokosuka to get copies.

That doesn't mean all opposition to GW's stationing in Japan will have gone away. Japanese news services reported this week that 10,000 people gathered in an anti-American demonstration in Yokosuka. In a land where a "demo" has drawn 100,000 protesters in the past, 10,000 seemed a bit puny.

The commander, Rear Adm. James Kelly, and public affairs officers at U.S. Naval Forces Japan in Yokosuka decided on the manga after testing ideas on several focus groups of Japanese in and around the port town. Then they hired Harumi Sato and Hiroshi Kazusa, who are established manga artists and writers, to draw and write the book.

Life aboard the aircraft carrier is told through the eyes of a young sailor, Petty Officer 3rd Class Jack Ohara, whose father is a Japanese immigrant to the U.S. who married an American girl who gave birth to Jack. He has never been in Japan before and speaks little Japanese but meets his grandparents in Kamakura, a seaside town across the peninsula from Yokosuka.

At sea on the voyage to Japan, Jack wins the admiration of his shipmates by discovering a potentially dangerous fire in the ship's laundry and playing a key role in putting it out. Even the air boss, a senior officer, tells him to keep up the good work.

As the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde once wrote: "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." Thus it was with the real aircraft carrier. After sailing from the East Coast around Cape Horn and into the Pacific, the ship experienced a fire in air conditioning and refrigeration spaces toward the stern in May, injuring two dozen sailors and damaging vital cables. The ship headed to the naval base at San Diego for repairs.

Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter said in an interview here that the Navy was being cautious in making sure the damage had been repaired before the ship was returned to sea; he asserted that the nuclear reactors had not been harmed. Winter said GW would arrive in Japan before the end of September, about a month later than scheduled.

Nuclear safety is not addressed specifically in the GW manga. Said a U.S. officer who was engaged in the project, Cmdr. David Waterman: "Safety covers all topics, including the power plant. The reader learns about how sailors are trained to handle any issue, including fires. There is plenty of material out there that focuses on nuclear safety so we didn't need to have all our products focus on one specific topic."

The U.S. government, from the White House through all of Washington and out to every base in the U.S. and abroad, has been struggling for years with strategic communications, finding ways to persuade a target audience to accept an American viewpoint on a given issue.

With the GW manga, the Navy seems to have communicated with a plain and simple comic book. The manga, in Japanese or English, can be seen at www.cnfj.navy.mil.

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. His column appears weekly in Sunday's Focus section.