Hiroshi Fujimoto was one of the moving spirits in the great
surge of enthusiasm in Japan for manga magazines, books, and movies.
He worked
in tandem with a close friend from schooldays, Abiko Motoo, born like Hiroshi
in Toyama Prefecture. His date of birth made him only three months Hiroshi's
junior. They used the pen-name of Fujio-Fujiko and lived together in the same
small apartment in downtown Tokyo until their success as cartoonist
storytellers allowed them to marry and buy palatial adjoining residences for
their families.
Fujio-Fujiko first achieved fame with the children's comic
tale Obake no Kyutaro, popularly called "Oba-Q". After it appeared in
February 1964 in Shonen Sande ("Shonen Sunday") magazine, its success
was so meteoric, the publisher changed his magazine from a monthly to a weekly,
starring the strange amorphous figure of Oba-Q which soon began to turn up
everywhere as toys and on posters and children's clothes.
This success was followed by Ninja Hattorikun, an amiable
idiot and above all the greatest children's icon ever since the Seventies,
Doraemon.
It is hard to explain to Westerners the perverse fascination
of this atomic-powered robotic cat. It far surpasses in originality the (Western) insufferable cat Garfield.
The bicephalic authors first unleashed Doraemon in the pages
of Shogakkan, a comic weekly of the standard 300-page format, in 1970. In a
typical childhood fantasy, the little boy Nobita, a bookish, bespectacled nerd,
discovers this cute, cool, magical cat in the drawer of the desk at which all
Japanese children slave over their homework.
Doraemon is smart, with three
spiky whiskers on either side of a capacious mouth, and a sort of kangaroo
pouch from which he produces all kinds of astonishing things, including a
miniature helicopter that enables him to zoom around the room and the
countryside.
He is surely a small child's dream-fulfilment fantasy of an
all-powerful protector in a harsh adult world of endless swotting and school
bullying.
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