Doraemon

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Doraemon, the hero of a Japanese manga series by Fujiko F. Fujio, is a robotic cat with no ears. Robotic mice chewed them off, and he has feared mice ever since. The same sadness drained his original yellow color and left him blue.

  That odd detail belongs to a cat who arrives from the future with a pocket full of impossible tools. Why was he sent? What does he carry? How did one cat become a symbol for a whole country, and why did his creator leave no final chapter?

  7179

• 2. A Boy and His Robot

  ›

  Nobita Nobi, a ten-year-old schoolboy in Tokyo, is kind-hearted and honest. He is also lazy and clumsy, and he does badly at both schoolwork and sports.

  Help arrives from the 22nd century. Nobita's future great-great-grandson, Sewashi Nobi, sends the robot cat Doraemon back in time to look after his ancestor so that the family's descendants can have a better life. Doraemon carries a four-dimensional pocket. From it he pulls tools and gadgets from the future whenever Nobita runs into trouble.

  Three main friends surround Nobita. Takeshi Goda, nicknamed Gian, is strong and domineering but loyal. Suneo Honekawa, Gian's sidekick, is wealthy and spoiled, and he leans on Gian's friendship to win respect from other schoolmates. Shizuka Minamoto is gentle and kind, Nobita's best friend and his crush. She is his prospective future wife, although in the beginning that future wife is Gian's younger sister.

  Gian and Suneo, for all their friendship, typically bully and abuse Nobita. He answers by using Doraemon's gadgets to fight back. He tends to get carried away, and so do Gian and Suneo when they steal a gadget. Unintended consequences follow for everyone nearby.

  Two more recurring characters round out the cast. Dorami is Doraemon's younger sister. Hidetoshi Dekisugi is a gifted student and a close friend of Shizuka, and his talents regularly stir up Nobita's jealousy.

  2179312

• 3. Three Accidents and a Name

  ›

  Hiroshi Fujimoto wrote under the pen name Fujiko F. Fujio, and he traced the birth of Doraemon to three coincidences. He was hunting for ideas for a new manga and wished for a machine that would invent them for him. While he was thinking this, he tripped over his daughter's toy. Then he heard cats fighting somewhere in his neighborhood.

  For the plot and the cast, Fujio borrowed from his earlier manga Obake no Q-Tarō, in which an obake lives with humans. Doraemon follows a similar formula. He described the final idea as the product of "an accumulation of trial and error", after which he found the style of manga that suited him best.

  Gekiga, a style well known at the time, kept the new series from finding much success at first. It became a hit only after it was adapted into an anime television series and multiple feature films.

  The name Doraemon can be roughly translated as "stray". It is written in an unusual mixture of two Japanese scripts, katakana and hiragana. "Dora" is a corruption of nora, the word for stray. The "-emon" ending is an old-fashioned suffix for male names, as in Ishikawa Goemon.

  The name Nobita Nobi echoes "nobi nobi". That phrase describes the way a young child grows up free, healthy and happy, unrestrained in any sense.

  Even the neighborhood hides a reference. Tsukimidai-Susukigahara, the fictional corner of Nerima Ward in Tokyo where the friends live, points to the real Fujimidai neighborhood. Osamu Tezuka's residence and his animation studio, Mushi Production, are based there.

  31013147

• 4. Simple Shapes, Firm Values

  ›

  Circles and ellipses make up Doraemon's design. Fujio aimed the series mainly at children, so he kept the drawing style simple. He also reused the same sequences of cartoons with regularity and continuity so that young readers could follow along easily.

  Blue became the main color of Doraemon in the magazines, which used to carry a yellow cover and a red title.

  Tokyo is the stage, and the manga reflects parts of Japanese society such as the class system and the "ideal" of Japanese childhood. Problems get resolved without relying on violence or eroticism. Environmentalism is woven into the stories. The manga also insists on integrity, perseverance, courage, family and respect.

  For much of the action, Fujio chose a "children's domain". There, young people can live with happiness, freedom and power without adult interference. He wanted this to underline the crucial role of the younger generation in society. Saya S. Shiraishi noted that the domain helped Doraemon appeal strongly in various Asian countries.

  Fujio did not want his characters to change. He compared a successful hero to "the stripes on a barber pole". Such a hero "seems to keep moving upward, but actually he stays in the same place."

  Zensho Ito, a former student of Fujio, said that the "length" of time in the universe was one idea behind the series. Unlike Western works of science fiction, the manga never explains the theory or technology behind its tools. It focuses on how the characters exploit them, which makes it more child-friendly. Nobita's desire to control time runs through the stories, and the Time Machine in his desk drawer is the gadget that feeds it.

  89101993

• 5. The Pocket of Gadgets

  ›

  Fujio said that Doraemon owns 1,293 gadgets in total. A 2004 analysis by Yasuyuki Yokoyama of Toyama University counted differently. He found 1,963 gadgets spread across 1,344 sketches.

  Among the most frequent is the Take-Copter, a small piece of bamboo headgear that lets its wearer fly. The Anywhere Door is a pink door that takes people wherever the person turning the knob is thinking of. The Time Kerchief can turn an object new or old, or a person young or old. The Translator Tool, a cuboid piece of jelly, lets anyone converse in any language. The Designer is a camera that instantly dresses up its user.

  Saya S. Shiraishi called most of the gadgets "an impressive testimony to the standards of quality control and innovation that exist in the twenty-second century." The tools are an essential part of the series. They reflect a positive view of technology in children's lives and express the wishes of modern society.

  Italian writer Massimo Nicora read the tools differently. He saw a manga that "criticizes, with irony, the omnipotence of science", since the gadgets often leave problems worse than they began. He also called it "the metaphor of the childish imagination", forever finding odd and original solutions in "a continuous game of transformation of reality".

  161719993

• 6. Pages and Screens

  ›

  In December 1969, Doraemon appeared in six monthly children's magazines from Shogakukan, among them Yoiko and Yōchien. Their readers ranged from nursery school to fourth grade. In 1973, two more magazines for fifth and sixth graders began running the manga. In 1977, CoroCoro Comic was launched as its flagship home.

  The stories were gathered into forty-five tankōbon volumes, published from the 31st of July 1974 to the 26th of April 1996. The Takaoka Central Library in Toyama, where Fujio was born, holds them. Doraemon's Long Tales, a manga and movie series ongoing since 1979, gave the characters longer adventures and ran to twenty-four volumes from 1983 to 2004.

  Later collections kept finding new material. Short stories that missed the original volumes appeared in the Doraemon Plus books. A set of 119 unpublished stories filled six color volumes. A twenty-volume master collection gathered all 1,345 of Fujio's stories between 2009 and 2012. For the 50th anniversary in December 2019, a "Volume 0" presented six versions of Doraemon's first appearance.

  The first animated attempt came in 1973 from Nippon Television. After a pilot in January, twenty-six episodes of two segments each aired from the 1st of April to the 30th of September 1973. Then the studio, Nippon TeleMovie Productions, went bankrupt, and the masters were sold off or destroyed. As of 2013, only 21 of the 52 segments are known to survive, and two of those have no audio.

  Shin-Ei Animation, now owned by TV Asahi, tried again, and its series debuted on TV Asahi on the 2nd of April 1979. Nobuyo Ōyama voiced Doraemon, so Asian audiences sometimes call it the Ōyama Edition. It produced 1,787 episodes. On the 15th of April 2005, a major renewal replaced the voice actors and staff and updated the character designs. Wasabi Mizuta voiced Doraemon, and fans call this series the Mizuta Edition.

  As of 2025, Shin-Ei Animation has produced 44 annual feature-length films, released by Toho. The first twenty-five follow the 1979 anime and the rest follow the 2005 version. They lean toward action-adventure, dropping the familiar cast into exotic and perilous settings.

  A 3D computer-animated film, Stand by Me Doraemon, arrived in Japan on the 8th of August 2014. It grossed $183.4 million worldwide, and a sequel followed on the 20th of November 2020. Directors Takashi Yamazaki and Ryūichi Yagi wove several manga short stories into one complete tale. It runs from the first time Doraemon came to Nobita's house to the moment he says farewell.

  2934625897

• 7. The Missing Ending

  ›

  In 1994 the original run stopped, and Fujimoto died in 1996 without ever giving Doraemon an ending. That gap has fed numerous urban legends over the years.

  The best-known invented ending came from an amateur cartoonist using the pen name "Yasue T. Tajima". It first appeared on the Internet in 1998 and became a manga in 2005. In it, Doraemon's battery dies. Nobita grows up to become a robot engineer, potentially reviving Doraemon, and the two live happily.

  In 2007, Tajima issued an apology for making his own ending. The profits were shared with Shogakukan and the copyright owner, Fujiko F. Fujio Pro.

  Yagi and Yamazaki, the two directors behind the 2014 film, confirmed that the story has had only one opening. Its ending, they said, has been rewritten several times. Shogakukan therefore had to clarify the rules. Only if the marriage of Nobita and Shizuka is finalized will the mission be accomplished, and then Doraemon will return to the future.

  18199910096

• 8. Reach and Reaction

  ›

  Noby, Sue, Sneech and Big G are the English names for Nobita, Shizuka, Suneo and Gian in a digital edition for the Amazon Kindle. Fujiko F. Fujio Pro announced it in July 2013 with the ebook publisher Voyager Japan and the localization company AltJapan. The food dorayaki became "Yummy Bun" or "Fudgy Pudgy Pie".

  The Walt Disney Company brought the 2005 anime to Disney XD and Disney Channel in the United States in the summer of 2014. It kept those names and swapped Japanese signs and graded papers for English text. Yen notes became US dollar bills, and the setting moved from Japan to the United States. Initial response to the edited dub was positive.

  By 1996, over 108 million volumes had sold in Japan alone. Worldwide, the manga passed 170 million copies by 2012, 250 million by 2019 and 300 million by 2024. With the film Doraemon: Nobita's Secret Gadget Museum, the movie series reached 100 million tickets sold in Japan, surpassing Godzilla. By 2020, the films had earned over $1.7 billion. The anime has aired in over sixty countries, premiering in Thailand in 1982.

  Vietnam set a record, with 40 million copies sold by 2006. Kim Đồng Publishing House launched the manga there in 1992, although the copyright from Shogakukan was not fully acquired until 1996. In 1993, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture called it "a comprehensively educational book series which has the effect of developing children's personality". In 1996, Fujio received the Ministry's Culture Fighter Medal for his contributions to youth education.

  The Japan Cartoonists Association honored the manga in 1973 and again in 1994. In 1982, it received the first Shogakukan Manga Award for children's manga. In 1997, it won the Grand Prize at the first Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize.

  Critic Mark Schilling wrote that Doraemon offers kids with regulated lives "a welcome breath of freedom". He added that it gives them a glimpse of "a funnier, friendlier world where all dreams, even foolish ones, can come true." Anne Allison, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, argued that the strongest appeal lay in the relationship between Doraemon and Nobita rather than in the variety of gadgets.

  Not everyone welcomed the cat. Some Chinese media outlets considered Doraemon politically subversive and a tool of Japan's "cultural invasion". Education groups in Taiwan demanded a ban because the plots involve bullying. In 2016, a resolution to ban the Hindi-dubbed series was submitted in Pakistan. Legal notices in India targeted Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan, though no bans materialized.

  On the 22nd of April 2002, Time magazine's Asian Hero issue named Doraemon one of twenty-two Asian Heroes. He was the only anime character, described as "The Cuddliest Hero in Asia". In 2008, Japan's Foreign Ministry appointed him its first anime ambassador. In 2012, he was granted official residence in Kawasaki, one hundred years before his birth. A Fujiko F. Fujio museum opened there on the 3rd of September 2011.

  Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece, took the idea of "Devil Fruits" from the manga. Masashi Kishimoto, creator of Naruto, drew characters from childhood anime shows including Doraemon. A Hudson Soft game for the NES, released on the 12th of December 1986, sold over 1.15 million copies. In 2015, McDonald's served Doraemon-themed Happy Meals, and Uniqlo sold a clothing line designed by Takashi Murakami.

  The character even turned up in a village in northern Thailand. In 2015, drought-stricken villagers used a Doraemon toy to complete a rain-ritual, to avoid the controversy that real animals would have caused.

  9110828372