Doraemon

Title

Does Taking Doraemon Seriously Crush Its Appealing Spirit of Affectionate Whimsy?

Author Robert C. MarshallProfessor EmeritusDepartment of AnthropologyWestern Washington UniversityBellingham, WA 98225

robert.marshall@wwu.edu

Abstract

Structural analysis of the perduring Japanese anime Doraemon reveals the source of the

unimaginable popularity of this children's cartoon.  The paradigmatic structure's minor

contradiction shows us that neither Nobita's childish childhood problems nor the hyper-

technology of the future Doraemon pulls from its pouch, as funny as they can be made to seem,

matter in this world; but the major contradiction, that Japanese mothers both do and do not build

their children's characters to succeed in the outside world, presents a relationship that Japanese

children and their parents can never rehearse enough.  In this long-running myth, the part of the

Mother is played by Doraemon.

Key Words

technology, Japan, Doraemon, anime, structuralism, robots, mothering

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Doraemon

Introducing Doraemon

Doraemon 1

1) Nobita: “Waaaaaa?”

Doraemon: “It’s me*. Hope I haven’t upset you.”

2) Nobita: “Who, who…, Where did you come from? What, what….”

3) Nobita: How…, how…, how did you come out of a place like this?

Doraemon: “If you ask me everything all at once, I can’t answer you.”

4) Doraemon: “And anyway, what does it matter? I’m here to save you from a horrible

fate.”

(The personal pronoun Doraemon uses for itself, “boku,” is an informal one used especially by

boys and young men.)

In March 2008 Japan's Foreign Ministry appointed Doraemon the nation's first "anime

ambassador." First broadcast in 1979 and based on the cartoon (above) introduced in manga

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Doraemon

form in 1969, the Doraemon animated TV series celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2019.

Between 1979 and 2005, over 1700 fifteen-minute episodes in the original series were broadcast.

The new edition begun in 2005 continues this pace into the present. Doraemon’s creator died in

1996 but the franchise flourishes, still as popular as ever (Yokoyama, 2000b). Every summer at

least one full length Doraemon film, now totaling more than fifty, is released to theaters. The

2014 animated film Stand by Me Doraemon pulled together the main story threads of the first

seven years of the original television anime series into one continuous narrative for a new cohort

of children. A major commercial success in Japan, this film ranked number one on the box

office charts for five consecutive weeks, the second highest-grossing Japanese film in Japan for

2014. The present article takes up the task of understanding why Doraemon enjoys such a deep

and abiding popularity.

It is worth thinking carefully from the start about what we require from any adequate

answer. At the very least we must discover the consistent appeal this cartoon has for young

children, why children actually like this anime, whatever in it additionally makes it safe enough

for children, amusing or thought provoking in adult eyes. Yes, of course, Doraemon is lovable;

and, certainly, the messes it and Nobita get into using Doraemon’s himitsu dogu (futuristic

gadgets) are funny. But asking next why Japanese children find Doraemon so lovable, and why

the daily transformation of Doraemon’s hyper-technology into a suburban Tokyo Pandora’s box

is funny, leads us into deeper waters.

Disciplining surmise with method, the structural analysis pioneered by Claude Levi-

Strauss give us the means to identify the deep emotional attachments binding Nobita and

Doraemon to each other and to their ever renewing and replenishing audience of young children,

even as children from nine to ninety-three laugh at the next fine mess the gadgets get them into,

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Doraemon

day after day, year after year, decade after decade. And too, in so far as we must account for the

effects in our lives of our own imaginative creations, any adequate reckoning must find a place

for Godelier’s (1999, p.173) rumination on just why we hide so much from our social selves: “…

there is something in society which is part of the social being of its members and which needs

opacity in order to produce and reproduce itself.” By beginning with the search for

contradictions in a social system, reproduced as distinctions in a system of classification,

structural analysis provides the means as well to search for what is consistent in works of the

imagination within the vast variation of the daily dispensation. The paradigmatic structure of the

Doraemon myth opposes intimacy, which Japanese mothers can and do and must provide, to

maturity, which they don’t and, in the Japanese view, shouldn’t provide, modeled as the

disastrous unintended consequences for human social relations of promising technology even

when it works as designed. As loving and lovable as mothers are, they cannot provide their

children with all the resources they will need to cope successfully with the wide world, any more

than technology, as useful as it may seem, can solve real problems of human relations, which

require mature adults. While neither mothers nor technologies fail and can be faulted for being

what and how they are, neither, even at their better-than-best, can they solve every, or maybe

any, human problem. In Doraemon, this is funny and compelling. The remainder of the paper

explicates this finding.

The slightly defective blue robot cat Doraemon sent from the 22nd century appears from

a desk drawer to become the permanent helper and companion to the similarly slightly defective

ten-year-old boy Nobi Nobita. How Japan is able not only to embrace this possibility but take it

for granted, gives us an opening to identify and examine this relationship between Nobita and

Doraemon in sufficient detail. Doraemon is a child’s cartoon, drawn by a professional team of

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Doraemon

adult artists. What role relation available to cartoonists and to children founds this interaction in

real Japanese life? What role here dare not speak its name and yet informs Doraemon’s

fundamental character and its relationship with Nobita? What makes the ultimately odd

Doraemon already familiar from his first appearance? Not another child, neither sensei nor

policemen, not a father or grandparent or even mother’s brother, Doraemon is a Mother, a most

characteristically Japanese Mother, which makes all the difference in Japan. The capital “M”

distinguishes here the symbol “Mother” from the observable behavior of any living mother, and

from the two-dimensional character “Mama” in the cartoon.

The narrative explicitly demands in the most tedious manner possible, by merely harping

on it day after day, that its audience acknowledge that children must form a reliable, resilient and

conventionally conformist character; and then it does all it can structurally to keep its audience

of children and their parents, and by now their grandparents too, from consciously considering

how mothers help their children grow up. The ethnographic record on mothers documents the

extent to which Japanese culture actively denies that mothers play a role in preparing their

children to face the wider world beyond home. Mothers create a bond of intimate dependence

with their children by tempering authority with affectionate indulgence. It is precisely this

indulgent intimacy that must be lost as children venture away from home, away from mother.

No one can ever expect to find outside their home this wonderful affectionate, indulgent,

intimacy they first found and always re-find in their mother. Doraemon finds its place in

Japanese culture in large part by drawing on and tacitly reproducing this effect and cultural

knowledge by establishing a relation of opposition between intimacy and maturity. It does so by

drawing an analogy to the effects of advanced technology, which seems to promise so much and

yet proves itself again and again incapable of solving genuine problems of human relationships.

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Doraemon

In Doraemon, while this secondary contradiction is made funny, sweetness and poignancy

permeate the primary contradiction.

The fundamental contradiction running through Doraemon, then, opposes a Japanese

Mother’s profound, devoted, and tender care for her child to her culturally specified inability to

help her child mature. That Nobita’s 21st century descendent Sewashi feels that sending

Doraemon back to the past will help Nobita develop an improved mature character requires an

audience that can implicitly accept that Nobita’s mother cannot manage this, and from the

perspective of the future, did not manage to raise a son adequate to secure the future of his ie, the

only real task mothers have. And yet, neither is Doraemon able to accomplish this routine feat,

not daily and not in 40 years. Sewashi has simply sent a Mother back to the past.

How then does the Japanese Mother raise her children? Doraemon’s relationship to its

charge Nobita plays out the pattern of persevering care founded in the combination of

affectionate indulgence (amae) and autonomous responsibility that reproduces the Japanese

cultural ideal of the care of a mother for her child (Marshall, 2017, p.274). Doraemon does not

demand, insist, discipline or punish; it indulges, supports, encourages, puts up with, whines,

weeps, cajoles and even mildly chides its charge. It carries out its task of caring for Nobita as a

constant companion and helper to improve Nobita’s character with genuine devotion to Nobita’s

well-being, and yet its help never refashions Nobita into anything like the modern Momotarō,

Japan’s traditional child folk hero, which it is the robot’s explicit purpose to effect. Nobi

Nobita’s name itself plays on the fact that Nobita never grows up, even encouraging viewers to

imagine how nice it could be not to have to grow up (Benson, 2015, p.236).

The major contradiction of the story elaborates the many ways Doraemon does and does

not help Nobita build a capable, self-reliant character (Yokoyama, 2000a, p.507). The minor

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Doraemon

contradiction the story models opposes the thousand and one dazzling gadgets from the future

Doraemon pulls from its pouch at Nobita’s insistence, to the amusing futility of their use. The

childhood problems, the gadgets and the messes they make, pull children in and get them and

their parents laughing, but the gravity of the major contradiction centering on Doraemon’s

loveable nature and abiding affection for the eternally unregenerate Nobita, holds them for the

rest of their lives and even now as parents themselves. Like its own gadgets, Doraemon is not

quite right for the job it has been assigned. Because Doraemon perpetually fails to resist

Nobita’s persistent importunity, Nobita never learns to rely on and develop his own capacities,

and so does not grow at all, let alone grow into a modern Momotarō, any more than technology,

however advanced, can solve those problems of human relations which require mature adults.

We are told Doraemon’s own flawed technology prevents it from straightening Nobita

out: perhaps it can’t, but it looks as if it simply won’t. In any event, it doesn’t. Doraemon

presents itself as having come to save Nobita from a horrible fate, but later we learn that Nobita’s

distant descendant sent Doraemon back to our present “to whip the disappointing boy into shape”

(Orbaugh, 2002, p.113). This never happens. And this is not what Japanese Mothers do.

Technology appears to give Nobita’s great-great-great grandson 10-year-old Sewashi the

capacity to (re)form the child Nobita’s character by steady correction and guidance through

Doraemon’s programmed presence. This appearance is illusory. Nobita does not grow up and

technology does not solve his problems.

Method

Fujimoto Hiroshi, creator of Doraemon, and Claude Levi-Strauss, author of “The

Structural Study of Myth” (which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2015), two giants of 20th

century mythology, form a gestalt on a Mobius strip. “When a manga hero becomes a success,

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Doraemon

the manga suddenly stops being interesting,” said Fujimoto. “So the hero has to be like the

stripes on a barber pole; he seems to keep moving upward, but actually he stays in the same

place” (quoted in Shilling, 1997, p.43). From Levi-Strauss (Levi-Strauss, 1955, p.105) we learn

that

…a myth exhibits a “slated” structure which seeps to the surface, if one may say so,

through the repetition process. However, the slates are not identical. And since the

purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an

impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite

number of slates will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. Thus,

myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has originated it is

exhausted.

Since 1979 one fifteen-minute episode has been broadcast nightly at 6:45, just before the

evening news. More than 2000 of these fifteen-minute spiraling “slates,” over 50 full-length

movies and an innumerable number of manga collections across forty years now have evidently

not exhausted the impulse that moves Japanese children and now their parents, who themselves

once watched as children, to attend to Doraemon and Nobita’s ever-turning barber pole.

Nobita’s problems, the himitsu dogu (now on the order of 1500), and the jams they produce

change daily. Doraemon and Nobita remain unchanged. One Saturday evening in 2004 while

living in Japan, I viewed the Doraemon 25th Anniversary Special, four continuous hours of

Doraemon cartoons, 16 in all. From the almost infinite body of narrative created since

Doraemon was first introduced in 1969, I draw primarily on the Doraemon Television

Collection, Part 1, Vol. 1-3 (2001) for this analysis, a different sixteen episodes.

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Doraemon

Analysis of the artifacts of popular culture requires both reliable techniques of

interpretation and a reliable method to place those artifacts in their cultural matrix. Ad libitum

interpretation, far from providing reliable understanding of the place of a popular artifact in its

culture, operates on pop culture as a projection system that, between the object and the

interpreter, reproduces ever more intricately the capacity of the object to insinuate itself into the

popular imagination and thicken descriptions. As examples of interpretation in this mode, at one

end of the range Shiraishi (2000, p.293) approvingly quotes Shilling’s (1997, pp.44-45) cotton

candy characterization, “a breath of freedom and a glimpse of a funnier, friendlier world where

all dreams, even foolish ones, can come true.” At the other end, in the dyspeptic view of The

Anime Encyclopedia’s unattributed Doraemon entry, “the cat’s techno assistance causes more

trouble than it is worth” (Clements and McCarthy, 2006, p.158). The Wikipedia Doraemon

entry shares this view: “A typical story consists of Doraemon using one of his [sic] gadgets in

order to assist Nobita in various ways, often causing more trouble than he [sic] was trying to

solve.”

Interpreters often try to find some way to show that the material they discuss is useful to

people trying to understand the wider world as well, through comparisons of possible

similarities, as symbolism encourages us to do. McVeigh (2914, p.220) offers an interpretation

tying Doraemon to sentient automata, contrasting a “Western” view of robots that might well

turn on their creators (Gans, 2017) with a more benign Japanese view:

For example, in Doraemon the dreams and aspirations of a peaceful and prosperous life

are projected onto a feline robot. In this anime, a linkage is made between children

(specifically, Nobita) and robots, both of which can be viewed as “blank slates” not

corrupted by the evil adult world.

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Doraemon

In this mode of interpretation, the object interpreted becomes an illustration of a general point,

usually referred to as the object’s meaning: here, that the Doraemon corpus shows how Japanese

people think about robots. Surely, one thinks, there must be more than this in even one episode,

and even if so, wouldn’t one episode have been enough to make the point?

Nakamura (2005, p.2-3), celebrating Doraemon’s 25th anniversary as a television series,

draws her comparison with other Asian cultures to focus on education:

Why is Doraemon so loved around the world, and especially in Asia? Many Asian

societies place great importance on academic achievement and exam results, so children

need to study constantly. Maybe children in Asia identify with Nobita, who is always

being yelled at by his mother to “study harder!”

In this same vein, Shilling (1997, p.40) writes, “Unlike Charlie Brown’s Snoopy,

Doraemon is something of a moralizing maiden aunt who is forever urging Nobita to study hard,

finish his homework on time, and be more self-reliant.” Doraemon does often urge Nobita to do

better: its assignment as a robot is to improve Nobita’s character. But Japan lacks the category

“maiden aunt;” neither children nor adults in Japan have the cultural opportunity to think of

Doraemon in this light. Virtually everyone in Japan marries and does so when they are ready to

have a child (Senda 2013). Surely, one thinks, there must be more than this in even one episode.

No children are going to love a cartoon character for its hectoring on any topic.

Maybe Asian children do identify with the lazy and poor student Nobita; or possibly

Doraemon and Nobita, one or both, can be viewed as “blank slates;” but would anything in

Doraemon impel us to think so? Surely Doraemon’s programming, its built-in mission, counts

for something. And so, if we have our doubts about any interpretation, what can we do? And

more importantly, would anything in Doraemon compel Japanese children to think any of this?

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Doraemon

How would thinking so help us understand why Doraemon has been so unimaginably popular for

so very long? In the best bricolage tradition, anyone might take up as much of Doraemon as

they care to – there is so much of it! - and use what they’ve taken for their own purposes, e.g., to

illustrate Japanese and Western intuitions regarding imaginary automata called robots, or to

speculate upon Japan’s well-known “kyoiku mamas.” In one remarkably creative venture, the

Japan Visiting Nurses and Nursing Care Association even published in their professional journal

a series of seven one-page articles in which Yokoyama (2000b) aims at helping their members

gain the acceptance and trust of those families they visit by working through the ways the

remarkably strange stranger Doraemon came to be accepted, trusted and loved by the Nobi

family! No doubt there are multiple ways in which a nurse visiting a family in need is like

Doraemon popping in permanently on the Nobi family, would one but look for them. And an

infinity of ways Japanese of all ages might use Doraemon to reflect on Japanese culture and the

world.

How can we control our understanding of complex cultural objects beyond the simple

associations symbols evoke in us except with an explicit technique of interpretation? While an

interpreter looks at a cultural object to understand how it can be, in what way it might be

understood to be true, valid, appropriate in its variable cultural setting, thus helping the symbol

do its job, as it were, structural analysis generates falsifiable hypotheses by identifying the

underlying relationship of those elements of cultural knowledge in contradiction which the myth

models, revealing the cultural impasse preventing action from resolving this contradiction. It

does so by recognizing that what is being structured in an artifact of popular culture is cultural

knowledge, knowledge about relations among categories of thought represented by words and

objects as specific instances or members of multiple categories in a specific cultural relationship.

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Doraemon

This immense Doraemon transformation set (Descola, 2016) can be understood to tell us

that in the same way advanced technology only seems to solve peoples’ problems but cannot

really do anything fundamentally worthwhile for human relationships, mothers only seem to

prepare their children to make their way in the world but cannot really do so. And at the same

time, it tells us that mothers do prepare their children for the wider world, but they for some

reason try to seem not to be able to do this and in Japan are thought to be unable to do this.

While new technology is introduced regularly in real life in Japan, and fantastic technology

every day in Doraemon, relations between real mothers and their children change with the pace

of the child’s development. But cultural patterns of mothering change very little over

comparable spans. These different rates of change make it possible to use the rapid introduction

and evaluation of technology to model the very long-term effects on adult character of mothering

in the Japanese way and the profound contradictions of mothering practices. Mothers are loving

and beloved. Can it possibly be that they do not have any lasting effect, or even a negative

effect, on their child’s character? Of course not. But since they do raise their children to grow

up to be typically Japanese, why does Japanese culture represent them as unable to prepare their

children for life in the wider world?

Structural analysis of symbolism, condensed representations of cultural knowledge,

requires the analyst to take a position outside the culture of interest and to take interpretations of

cultural objects from within that culture as additional information also requiring explanation.

But structural analysis only offers hypotheses on the place of local knowledge in its local cultural

setting, the setting of its audience. It has nothing of a universal nature to offer at all regarding

the knowledge it structures, in this case, e.g., mothering. What is apparently universal is the

psychology which underlies the symbolic mechanism in the way it structures symbolism, that

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Doraemon

people everywhere establish relations among the categories of thought by analogy, that all

humans seem to recognize that some things are like other things, and find that useful in figuring

out what to do next.

The present analysis develops a cognitive approach to the analysis of Doraemon

(Matsuya 2012) to understand symbolic structures as public patterns for action based on

interested local knowledge, rather than the semiotic approach of looking at symbols as embodied

loci of encoded, disinterested meanings. Symbols in this view establish relations among the

categories of thought in a culture to the end that people might still act in the face of paradox,

contradiction and dilemma. Symbols work by linking figuratively, analogically rather than

causally, the domain in which action is necessary but problematic to other domains of

experience, knowledge of which does provide a basis for confident action.

Concern for how symbols construct and structure culture dominated anthropology in the

long post-war period. Levi-Strauss’s (1955, p.105) hypothesis cited earlier, that “the purpose of

a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction,” opened an

immensely productive period in the analysis of symbolism. Yet in time it became clear (Kertzer,

1988, p.69), that if a symbol might mean both one thing and its contradiction or opposite (a

putative property of symbols commonly called ‘multivocality’), the useful scientific work to

which the concepts of meaning, symbol, and communication might be put must be significantly

vitiated, lending more support to cognitive than semiotic theories of symbolism (Lakoff, 1987).

At the same time Levi-Strauss was developing his semiotic approach to the structural

analysis of symbols, Goodenough (1957) was urging consideration of culture as the knowledge

one requires to participate in society. Extending this shift to the cognitive analysis of

symbolism, Sperber made the compelling case that, as is true of words and sentences, “if

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Doraemon

symbols had a meaning, it would be obvious enough” (1975, p.84), concluding that the

Saussurian semiology project “established, all unknowing, that symbols work without meaning”

(1975, p.52). As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, p.44) have expressed the matter so cogently,

anthropology is to be found among “…the sciences of man that take meaning seriously, that is,

hermeneutics, and … which abandon meaning altogether, that is, structuralism.” In this

conception, symbolism is one kind of knowledge (cultural knowledge, local knowledge),

distinguished from 1) analytic knowledge (knowledge of words and language) by being

incapable of paraphrase; and from 2) synthetic or encyclopedic knowledge (knowledge from

experience of the world; now recently, scientific knowledge) by immunity to being dislodged by

novel experience or internal contradiction. What symbols do, then, is establish relations among

the categories of thought by means of statements about the world and objects in the world, to the

end that people might become able to act in the face of paradox, contradiction, dilemma,

puzzlement. How symbols work is by linking analogically rather than causally or logically the

domain in which action is necessary but problematic to other domains of experience, knowledge

of which has provided a basis for confident action.

Cultural knowledge is structured thru the relational logic of analogy, that some things are

like other things in particular ways, and so connects the concrete elements of experience to the

general categories of thought as instances of that category in ways that may help people find

associations that will allow them to act where they could not before. No element of symbolism

can bear an interpretation on its own, but only as it finds its place in a set of relationships. A tree

is not always “a symbol of life,” and an earless blue robot cat from the 22nd century is not always

a Japanese Mother. But both might be. Very commonly “similar” becomes “same” and

“different” is construed as “opposite.” At the same time, however, analogic thinking draws

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Doraemon

attention away from points of difference in the domains being compared. The creation of

cultural knowledge relies on both aspects of analogic reasoning. Consequently, Godelier’s “not

being able to talk about something,” openly and explicitly, that something necessary and

important to group solidarity and even group existence can only function as long as it is not

talked about, makes society work, even as it keeps us from understanding our own collective

creation and recognizing these creations as our own. In this way, humans make myths the way

oysters make pearls, working around rather than solving a problem, but enlarging and changing

the whole as we smooth out the rough edges. And yet, even while the underlying contradiction

has not been and will not be resolved, the cultural creation covering it and making certain actions

but not others possible becomes deeply attractive and compels attention.

Even all these years after the dissolution of the cultural category ‘author’ in the vitriol of

deconstructionism, it is still no longer certain that method can justify the structural analysis of

creations assigned to an identifiable individual, or even a small team, in so far as there seems not

yet to be a reliable way to show that this individual or team creates entirely from within the full

cultural discourse of their society. While the only possibility open to the bricoleur for the

purpose at hand is to stick together as best he can the ancient and broken bits of culture always

already lying about his feet, the still-lingering modernist notion of the creativity of the individual

artist is another way of saying she does not share the values, ideas, motivations and materials of

the collectivity from which she springs, Athena-like. The artist may celebrate the folk and draw

on the folk tradition, but he is not of the folk. At least now we can recognize this creature too,

the Creative Artist, as another cultural construct, another symbol. To be as long-lived and

popular as Doraemon, its creator and support team must have at least one foot in Japan’s

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Doraemon

collective unconscious, mustn’t they? But how to demonstrate this? How can we know that

what people get out of Doraemon has anything to do with what Fujimoto and his team put in?

Cultural Continuity and Context

Drawing from a still lively folk tradition can at least support the foundation of a method

that allows us to raise the question. Ouwehand’s (1964) structural analysis of popular

woodblock prints - the Edo era’s cartoons - that immediately flooded the city following the great

Tokyo earthquake of 1855, identifies the link between earlier and recent creators and consumers

of Japanese popular culture in the figure of Momotarō. This late Edo tsunami of cheap cartoons

portrays multiple interpretations of the traditional child folk hero Momotarō and his animal

companions (a talking dog, a monkey and a pheasant) descending into the bowels of the earth to

quell with just a drinking gourd the writhing of the giant catfish (namazu) which caused

earthquakes in Japan in those days. In one of the Doraemon franchise’s earliest theatrical

movies, “Boku, Momotarō no Nan na no, sa” (Doraemon: What I am for Momotarō), released in

1981, just two years after the inauguration of the television series, Nobita pops out of the peach

and Doraemon bears Momotarō’s iconic banner “Nihon Ichi” (“Japan Number 1”), self-

consciously connecting Momotarō lore to Doraemon. Doraemon plays to mythic rather than

modernist sensibilities.

Ouwehand’s analysis asserts that “the earthquake prints not only represent and illustrate in

word and picture the great Edo earthquake of 1855 – in other words they are not only a report of

this event – but that they also form, by means of a certain interpretation of the earthquake, a

reaction to it” (Ouwehand 1964, p.237). These woodblock prints were produced and consumed

at that time the way newspapers are even now, to be handled only a moment and then discarded

forever. And yet the remaining prints still number in the many thousands. These woodblock

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prints of catfish, coins, carpenters and child-heroes were the creation of many, many hands and

minds, immediate, unorganized, anonymous. We cannot suspect, accuse or convict anyone,

certainly no one we would want, today, to call an artist, or even a reporter, of having put

anything into them. In Ouwehand’s assessment,

The pressure of social unrest and dissatisfaction within the collectivum of the folk culture,

and the expectation of a new, ideal time, increased by the catalyzing tension of a

collectively and numinously experienced earthquake disaster, found an outlet in the

religiously-charged representations of the collective medium of the namazu prints (1964,

pp.238-39).

This deep connection to folk culture Ouwehand locates in these prints justifies at least the

attempt to analyze the structure of this newer but equally vast and appealing body of connected

cultural material, even if it is not produced obscurely and anonymously by many hands, but, in

the present case, within the conventional bounds of Japan’s 20th century commercial

entertainment industry by a small number of known, indeed now famous, cartoon artists

(Condry, 2013). Doraemon’s creator died in 1996 but the franchise continues as popular as ever

(Yokoyama, 2000b). That Momotarō and his animal companions re-establish the axis mundi

with a drinking gourd and so calm the rumblings of the earth, jostles evocatively with Nobita,

Doraemon, and the rest of his pals, for anyone who knows them both, which in Japan is

everyone. What they see is that in so many ways Nobita is no Momotarō. But in Doraemon,

they are confronted with deepest ambiguity: a very un-catlike earless blue robot cat from the

future, the orthography of whose name combines in its appearance something both foreign to

Japan and yet from pre-modern Japan, a strange yet familiar stranger, a robot who is not

identified as a robot, who talks like a boy and acts like a Mother.

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Doraemon, Nobita, Technological, Humanity

Exposition of the syntagmatic structure of Doraemon stories does not require elaborate

diagrams. Episode plots are formulaic. Nobita, a ten-year-old boy and only child who lives with

his mother and father in Tokyo, and the central character of the cartoon, is an utter mediocrity or

less in everything he does. The children in his neighborhood – the big bully Gian, the sneaky

nerd Suneo and the cute girl Shizuka -- are his friends and figure prominently in his adventures

with Doraemon. As the episode begins, Nobita has a problem. In the words of young fan Mijea ,

“so many hundreds of stories start off with Nobita running home in tears, crying "Doraemon! Do

something!".” Doraemon scholar Yokoyama, who approaches Doraemon analysis quantitatively

(Yokoyama, 2005), starts here too:

“Kōshita jōkyō ni taishite, Nobita wa namida o nagashinagara, “Doraemon!” to yonde

uchi ni tobikomi, jitai kaiketsu no tame no himitsu dogu o yōkyū suru no de aru.” [Faced

with some unpleasant situation, tears streaming from his eyes, Nobita flies into the house

calling out “Doraemon!” and tries to get it to fish a futuristic gadget out of its pouch to

solve the problem] (Yokoyama, 2000a, p.507).

Doraemon always resists but finally always yields. At first the gadget performs as required, but

then unintended and unforeseen consequences ensue, making matters worse, but funny. Nobita

seems to have learned his lesson by the end, but tomorrow’s episode reveals that he has not.

Wash, rinse, repeat as needed. Suitable for daily use with children.

Plot summaries of two 15-minute television episodes from the original series, one brief,

the next briefer, must serve as an introduction to Doraemon for anyone not yet familiar with this

anime franchise. Even among adolescent anime fans in the US, Doraemon remains relatively

unknown and under-appreciated.

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“Let’s build a subway”

Nobita wants to give Papa his own private subway for a birthday present. Doraemon is

overwhelmed, but Nobita really wants Doraemon to build it. Doraemon produces a digging

machine resembling a small submarine with treads, and a big screw tip on its front end. The

digging machine is evidently hard to direct: it wanders around under the earth like a drunken

mole, coming out in funny, unintended places such as the lion cage of the zoo, the women’s

public bath, the ocean.

Notwithstanding, Act III begins with Papa waking to a present beside his futon. In the

box is a subway commuter pass for the “Nobita Private Subway,” good for the “home to office”

ride. They take Papa into a hole in the back yard and Mama comes too. Sure enough, there is

one subway car there: Doraemon is the driver and Nobita is the conductor. As they ride along

Nobita and Doraemon cheer for how fine their subway is.

But then they see a light up ahead in their tunnel and slam on the emergency brakes,

stopping just in time to avoid colliding with a real construction crew putting in a real subway.

Nobita claims that the tunnel is his, and the crew chief accuses him of selfishness, when there are

lots and lots of people who need to ride a public subway. Doraemon agrees with the crew chief.

So they try another route with their digger, but it stalls and Papa has to start digging with

a pick. Papa realizes this is impossible and Nobita weeps bitter tears of apology. Doraemon too

cries and apologies to Papa. Papa forgives them, recognizing that they meant well. Doraemon

then spots a thin crack of light, through which they break into the sewer directly below Papa’s

office and he arrives at work on time, not much the worse for wear. The end.

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Doraemon

“For once in my life I’d like to get a hundred”

Nobita is a terrible student but wants good grades without studying. Doraemon says

“You’re hopeless” but gives him a “computer pencil” that simply writes the correct answers

automatically on the homework page. Nobita rushes over to Shizuka’s house with it, despite

Doraemon’s misgivings. Along the way he does Gian’s and Suneo’s homework for them. Then

at Shizuka’s house he blasts through the paper work mountain her father had to bring home from

the office.

Nobita wants to use the pencil on tomorrow’s test, but Doraemon says that’s cheating.

Nobita is adamant and Doraemon pulls a long face filled with disappointment, but finally gives

in. Nobita struggles with his conscience all night, and by the time of the test the better angel of

his self has won. He writes his test with his regular pencil, one that has always earned him Ds

and Fs in the past. It does so again.

When he returns the computer pencil to Doraemon, though, Doraemon instantly identifies

it as a fake. What happened to the authentic computer pencil?

Next day, teacher praises Gian as the only student who got a hundred, or who even did

well on the test. But Gian’s dad realizes that Gian must have cheated, since he has never in his

life gotten a good grade, let alone a hundred, and so gives him a good hiding. Gian returns the

computer pencil and is mad at Nobita and Doraemon for getting him in trouble. The end.

* * *

At a first pass, analysis abstracted a syntagmatic structure that could permit a lesson, a

“moral,” well within the range of available interpretations such as those discussed earlier: the

futuristic gadgets Doraemon produces from its pouch offer a constant temptation which, once

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Doraemon

viewers are exposed to their unintended and disastrous if amusing consequences, help us see

once again that only ningen kankei (human relations) can be ultimately satisfying.  Even a

children’s cartoon, when it draws such prolonged and profound praise and attention, deserves the

most serious understanding and appreciation we can give it, justifying the methodological

presumption that the narrative is important to its audience in ways that are not necessarily

apparent in any single episode or even run of episodes in so far as any single or even several

episodes are unlikely to provide the information needed to adequately understand what the

narrative brings to the knowledge and interests the viewer already has in place.

The second pass precipitated the paradigmatic structure

Doraemon’s gadgets : Nobita’s problems :: Doraemon : Nobita.

around a more intractable and sobering question: is the relationship between Doraemon and

Nobita ningen kankei? I was told once by a Japanese robotics engineer that Japanese people do

not think of Doraemon as a robot because it seems so human. Evidently this view is quite

widespread: “According to robotics specialist Sugihara Tomomichi (2004, p. 21), his [sic]

assimilation is so perfect that most people do not even perceive Doraemon as a robot; on the

level of popular opinion, he [sic] remains a living being” (Benson, 2015, p.241). This

perspective has been difficult for me to assimilate. Doraemon is not a robot. There are no robots

available to our experience that we might confuse with human beings, even those prototypes

clothed in human appearance, only objects of the imagination. I have never heard or found

anyone to say they do not think Doraemon is a cat because it seems so human or so robotic. Yet

Doraemon is not human or robot or cat, it is a cartoon character, wholly a figure of the

imagination; in Benson’s (2015, p.241) words, “A robot who is not a robot.” A robot who is not

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Doraemon

a robot – and why do we really want to use “who” in this context in preference to ‘that’? – is

categorically different from a Mother who is not a mother.

The minor contradiction on the left imagines and elaborates the way the gadgetry

Doraemon pulls from its pouch both solves and fails to solve the endless minor problems of

modern childhood Nobita suffers. “TV audiences must love these gadgets because there is now

an encyclopedia dedicated to them which lists and explains over a thousand of Doraemon’s

devices” (Craig, 2000, p.296). Advanced technology holds a significant place in Japanese

society. Doraemon does not repudiate technology so much as throw its shortcomings into relief

against the enduring requirements of human social relations. The role these gadgets play in the

stories makes them very close to the plot device known as a “MacGuffin,” in so far as they really

do nothing at all, leaving no effect behind at the end of the episode. Alfred Hitchcock used the

term McGuffin conceptually to let him assert that his films were in fact not what they appeared

to be on the surface.

The major contradiction on the right side has been woven into the syntagmatic structure

of the stories in a less obvious way. In the midst of Doraemon’s kaleidoscope of problems,

secret gadgets, locations, scenery, dramatis personae, and temporal shifts, how shall we

characterize the enduring and unchanging relationship between Doraemon and Nobita? Can it

make any sense to think that human-robot relations can be, could ever be, should somehow be,

reciprocally strategic, that a robot could or should have agency rather than an assignment, a will

rather than a program, the ability to alter its own program to accomplish an alternative goal?

Doraemon has been sent back to the present from the 22nd century by Nobita’s dissatisfied

descendant Sewashi (like Nobita also a ten-year-old child, the future’s Nobita) to reform

Nobita’s character, to turn him from an utter non-entity into a 20th century somebody by altering

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Doraemon

Nobita’s character (rather than any specific event, against which time travelers are invariably

warned).

The discourse on the relationship of humanity to the complex increasingly computerized

machines we’ve created continues everywhere. Some writers such as Shilling, whose original

article appeared in The Japan Quarterly, and Shiraishi (2000) (also a revision of an earlier essay

(Shiraishi, 1997)), see largely eye-to-eye on Doraemon. Shiraishi quotes Shilling in agreement

and writes further herself, that:

In Doraemon [italics added], science and technology are intimately associated with

children. Nuclear-powered Doraemon is a symbol of the confidence and hope people

place in technology as the trustee of the future of their children. Technology, which once

caused total devastation, is purified by its association with and use by an innocent child,

and children are conceptually empowered as those who are responsible for befriending

and advancing science and technology (2000, p.295).

As Craig (2000, pp.296-97) lays out this matter:

Doraemon [italics added] represents the optimistic view of the relationship between

technology and humanity. Nobita exemplifies man as master of technology, secure in

the view that technology brings benefits to man, not fear, enslavement, or harm….

Nobita cheerfully experiments with Doraemon’s latest high-tech toy to solve his latest

problem, but these experiments generally result in mishaps.

But why should children care about or be interested in the cartoon by any of this? After

all, we cannot expect freehand interpretations to be any freer of internal contradictions than

myths themselves, but rather, will see such interpretations reproduce those same contradictions

without identifying them. The present analysis arrives at a different result through its explicit

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Doraemon

analytic technique. Doraemon is the negation of the expectation that technological can solve any

of life’s important problems, a reducto ad absurdum through humor and repetition.

Technological mishaps do not result in fear, enslavement or harm because Doraemon is a

humorous cartoon serving up unobjectionable, character-improving lessons for children -- don’t

be selfish, don’t cheat -- gently, not because anyone thinks the future will be free of tragic

technological disasters. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened, and now Fukushima has happened,

but Doraemon originated more than a generation ago and continues today with immeasurable

popularity. Even the hyper-technology of the future Doraemon fishes out of its pouch still only

seems to work in the perpetual present of the story: it works mechanically, more or less, but not

socially. It doesn’t finally add anything to the world and actually might cause a lot of problems

if allowed to remain in use. But in Doraemon, disaster is funny. All gets sorted out in the end,

and before the start of each next episode life has returned to the status quo ante. But neither has

Nobita grown more capable of facing and solving the problems life throws at him. And in a

children’s cartoon there is, of course, no reference to the invention of complex technologies as a

way for large companies to earn large profits, the entry point of technology into our world where

invention is the mother of necessity. Nor is there any hint of the vast wealth Doraemon has

generated for its owners and sponsors over the decades.

The self-referential and paradoxical irony underlying the daily reset button is that

Doraemon was sent back to our time by Nobita’s descendant from the 22nd century to save

Nobita, and so the descendent himself, from his dismal destiny. But Doraemon fails to change

Nobita at all. Even Doraemon’s hyper-technology of the future does not make today’s world

better and seems to make it worse, although not permanently worse; and Doraemon, technology

at its most vulnerably human-seeming, not only does not improve Nobita’s character, its

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Doraemon

presence in the narrative’s present moment prevents Nobita from growing up, the worst disaster

of all from the point of view of human social relations. The most Doraemon has done is make

time stand still. Even though the settings of the cartoon’s action change over the decades, for

example by bringing in the issue of ecology and environmental degradation, the structure of the

cartoon does not.

From the point of view of social relations vs. the inevitable changes brought on by

technological innovations, Doraemon is utterly conservative if not actively Luddite in its

sentiments: there’s no place like home, whatever home is like; gadgets will not improve it, but

will invariably make it worse if they do anything at all. Benson (2015) recognizes the

contradictions in the treatment of time in Doraemon, but her focus on the equivalence of past and

future, of nostalgia for the 1960s and a technologically utopian future, prevents her from

recognizing as well the contradictions presented by the anime’s technology, in both Doraemon

itself and its pouch’s gadgets. Nostalgia is an adult concern, not a child’s. The setting of 1970s

suburban Tokyo is not nostalgic for children, but merely so much unmarked background,

timeless in so far as it refers to no specific time or era for children. Sewashi sends Doraemon

back to the present, which is always our now, to correct the damaging effects of the hapless adult

Nobita on Sewashi’s life, to save Sewashi himself from “a horrible fate.” Sewashi, even with all

the technology Doraemon displays nightly at his disposal, is not living in paradise. He knows

Doraemon is defective, but sends it anyway, being the best he can manage. And yet, Sewashi

will never have his hopes fulfilled by the effects of improvement in Nobita’s adult life if time

stands still in Nobita’s childhood life, which it clearly has for the past 40 years. And it will stay

stopped into a barber-pole-like or mobius strip-like atemporal illusion of movement into the

indefinitely distant future as long as there is interest in the cartoon. But having seen 100 times

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Doraemon

this amusing story of why marvelous technology will not save the world, and the amusing

messes it makes for those who think it will come to their rescue, why would anyone, even a child

of five, want to hear it a 101st, or a 1001st, time?

Japanese Mothers, Burdens and Affection

One casual definition of neurosis is doing the same thing over and over, expecting

different results. The story does not tell us Nobita’s character never improves because his

descendant has sent a defective robot cat to help him. Once in the Nobi family, Doraemon simply

struggles with the material he’s been given and Nobita simply never grows up. We learn that

Doraemon is defective, but the story does not tell us that is why Doraemon is unable to nudge

Nobita into maturity. Takeo Doi’s (1973) path-breaking work on neurosis and amae, which he

identifies as the “need for human affection” (Johnson, 1993, p.ix), offers us a means to further

understanding of this major contradiction the myth models. While nothing of any real

importance at all depends on Doraemon’s gadgetry, Nobita and Doraemon depend on and care

for each other deeply and constantly despite the failures of Doraemon’s technology to solve

Nobita’s problems and despite Doraemon’s (and Nobita’s own) failure to improve Nobita’s

character along any timeline. Although Doraemon is not able to improve Nobita’s character,

either by lack of will or defective technology or something left implicit in the narrative, they

have a relationship which endures and is clearly deeply valuable to them both. We must look

among Japan’s life models available to children at age 10 and younger for this relationship of

interdependence based on enduring affection and support, and yet which fails to develop the

dependent child’s character in a way that will help the child enter into and participate effectively

in society as he grows up.

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Doraemon

And so deep inside Doraemon we find a Japanese Mother. That Mothers do and do not

build their children’s character remains tacit in the narrative, but appears strikingly conspicuous

in the ethnographic record. How can Mothers, so utterly selfless, so self-sacrificing, be thought

to have shortcomings precisely as Mothers, when they suffer so to indulge their dependents and

thus add their effort to help the next generation prosper and succeed, which is their fundamental

mission in life. Doraemon, the future relative’s defective technology sent back to build Nobita’s

character, is a Japanese Mother in deep disguise, because all Japanese know that Mothers were

never designed to create or reform character in a child in the first place. Sensei (teacher) does

this; Father would if he was ever home; the gang of neighborhood children (nakama) relish the

chance; public officials and police officers are Mother’s standby threat; and indeed the whole

rest of the world (seken, soto) requires it. Her most effective disciplinary threat, however, is to

cut off her flow of affection to her child. To see a mother place a misbehaving child outside and

close the front door, and to see that child not gleefully run off but cling, weeping, to the door,

begging to be let back in, has renewed more than one American anthropologist’s faith in the

reality of culture.

This Japanese Mother disguised as an earless blue robot cat sent to (re)build Nobita’s

character is deeply underdetermined in relation to Nobita’s equally overdetermined perpetually

childish child. Why would, how could, anyone watching Doraemon and laughing at the messes

Nobita makes with Doraemon’s gadgets see a Mother in a very un-cat-like earless blue figure

said to be a robot cat from the future with a gadget pouch in its belly and who talks like a boy?

The character Mother in the Japanese domestic drama indulges (amayakasu), but does not build

character directly or explicitly. As a superordinate, she is not authoritarian but an enabler. Only

later in life, when they recall her long-ago sacrifices for them, can her grown children draw on

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Doraemon

these emotion-laden memories to help them persevere (ganbari, gaman, a deeply revered

Japanese value) through life’s hardships (Kondo, 1990, pp.83-89). Memories of mother reduce

the hardest Japanese heart to tears. So sending a mildly flawed Doraemon back to the eternal

present is not exactly a mistake by Sewashi, but raises questions no one in Doraemon’s audience

can have any interest in clarifying. The story asserts that Doraemon is the best impoverished

Sewashi could manage with his limited childhood resources. Structurally, making Doraemon a

Mother in an earless blue cat costume (and when does a costume become a disguise?) is how

Fujimoto kept Nobita from growing up, how he keeps the barber pole turning, stimulating his

audience’s amused affectionate attachment, rather than its critically subversive awareness.

Viewers do not see Doraemon’s affectionate indulgence of Nobita’s demands as Doraemon’s

defect. One might hypothesize that Sewashi sent Doraemon back to sabotage the development

of a strong, self-reliant character in Nobita by habituating him to techno-junk, but that would be

a different story. Doraemon’s shortcoming as a cat is its fear of mice because long ago mice

chewed its ears off. But Mothers in Japan indulge their children. This is how they mother. All

their children turn out as Japanese as each other.

While Mothers everywhere are caregivers, they give care differently from culture to

culture. The discussion here focuses on three well-known accounts of Japanese mothering

relationships from the extensive ethnographic literature on motherhood in Japan. Peak contrasts

mothers with pre-school teachers; Kondo describes mothers of a certain age who work part-time

in a confectionary; and Iwao observes that mothers are also wives as well.

Mothers and preschool teachers appear identical because, after all, they are; but their

behavior is night and day to the children in their charge. In the popular wisdom of Japanese

mothers and teachers, the home and the outside world are so different that the family cannot

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teach the fundamental rules of social interaction governing life in the outside world. The home

is the home, preschool is the outside world, and the two settings require different styles of

behavior and habits of self-presentation for success.

This discrepancy between the public and the private, soto and uchi, has frequently been

described by observers of Japanese society. The Japanese language institutionalizes it and

ritualizes it in indigenous discourse on the social world (Bachnik and Quinn, 1994). The home,

or uchi, is the private, intimate arena in which one can relax, let all of one’s feelings show, and

expect indulgence and sympathy from other members of the family. Within the uchi a healthy

amount of self-indulgence, regressive behavior, and mild aggression are not only cheerfully

tolerated, but also encouraged as the indication of intimacy and trust. However, in the soto, the

outside world, one must learn to assume a genial and cooperative public persona, in which

individual feelings and desires must be subjugated to the harmony and activities of the group

(Peak, 1991, p.7).

The family (uchi) is not the group (shudan). Neither style of personal interaction trumps

the other in the abstract; in a healthy personality, each should be exhibited in the appropriate

situation. Japanese mothers desire to maintain a certain degree of amae in their child’s behavior

toward themselves and other family members while expecting that the child will learn to display

enryo (self-restraint) from and toward peers, neighbors, and others outside the family. The first

day of preschool presents this expectation to most Japanese children for the first time (Peak,

1991, p.16).

This practice of mothering can become a significant means of creating intimacy and trust

in other settings such as work as well, making them feel “homey.” At the confectionary factory,

women were instrumental in defining the tone of the work culture on the shop floor, the informal

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Doraemon

social relations on the job. “They did so primarily vis-à-vis the younger artisans, in their roles as

surrogate mothers” (Kondo, 1990, p.294). Most of the younger male artisans were in their late

teens or early twenties, while the part-timers tended to be women in their forties and fifties.

Kondo catalogues the ways these women provide the young men with a humanized work

atmosphere, a source of support and care, fostering feelings of togetherness, of “company as

family,” of work groups which, like the household, become the locus of emotional attachment.

“This position is a contradictory one, for it replays on the shop floor the notion that women are

emotional workers, care-givers and creators of an uchi (homey) feeling” (Kondo, 1990, p.295)

and so continually set themselves apart from the central story of maturity through apprenticeship

and masculine toughness and skill: while they are acting like mothers toward these young

artisans, they are not improving these young men’s characters as disciplined workers.

At the same time, however, their position as Mothers puts them in a position of advantage

over the male artisans and serves to make them important, though formally marginal, members

of the company. In Japan, Kondo carefully records, the position of care-giver or the one (the

amayakasu position) who indulges the selfish whims of another is actually a superordinate

position, often associated with parents or bosses. By asking favors of the part-timer women or

by acting childish, the young artisans are placing themselves in the amaeru position of a child or

a subordinate seeking indulgence (Kondo, 1990, pp.295-296).

Iwao describes how this pattern of indulgence based in the need for human affection, as

something that can be at least wheedled if not demanded, carries over into married life and the

relation between wives and husbands. The domestically helpless husband – and some women

do call their husbands “my big baby” or “eldest son” – is a prime target for caring patterns

shifted from the young. Japanese women give greater priority to their role as mother than wife,

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Doraemon

but in fact the two overlap considerably As well, this role tends to keep husbands acting like

children at home, “as they shift adeptly from the indulged son to the indulged husband” (Iwao,

1993, pp.88-89). North (2009, p.40) observes how this practice is naturalized within the

household: “Socialized for natural dominance and characterized as coddled and spoiled, first

sons were defined by what they did not do at home [housework or domestic chores of any sort],

regardless of their wives’ earning power or occupational prestige.” Nobi Nobita is an only child,

as are so many boys since the 1970s. As elders, men more easily amaeru than women, a

Buddhist priest explained when discussing care and loss in late life: “Strength is easier for

women to achieve. Men can cry ‘mommy’!” (Danely, 2014, p.177).

Conclusion

The Doraemon body of myth baits the hook of child character building explicitly, while

hiding at the same time the contradictions implicit in the Japanese understanding of the role

mothers play in preparing their children for life away from her, from home. Mothers create a

bond of intimate dependence with their children by tempering authority with affectionate

indulgence. This pattern of mothering is represented in Japanese culture as something which

cannot be found outside the home, a place of sanctuary from the harsh expectations of the wider

world. To stabilize this distinction between uchi and soto, home and the wide world, this

representation requires at the same time that Japanese culture actively deny that mothers play a

role in preparing their children to face the wider world. Mothers create a bond of intimate

dependence with their children by tempering authority with affectionate indulgence. It is

precisely this indulgent intimacy that must be lost as children venture away from home. No one

can ever expect to find outside their home this wonderful affectionate, indulgent, intimacy they

associate with their mother. And yet, the will to go on in the face of challenges and hardship can

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Doraemon

be strengthened by recalling mother’s willing and loving sacrifices. Doraemon finds its place in

Japanese culture in large part by drawing on and tacitly reproducing this effect and cultural

knowledge by establishing a relation of opposition between intimacy and maturity. It does so by

drawing an analogy to the effects of advanced technology, which seems to promise so much and

yet proves itself again and again incapable of solving genuine problems of human relationships.

In Doraemon this secondary contradiction is made funny as a means of misdirection, keeping its

audience from ever focusing on anything that could be identified as Mother’s shortcomings,

which she is not seen to have. The way mothers create uchi is not understood as preventing her

children from growing up as they age.

There seems to be no limit to the reluctant willingness of Doraemon to indulge Nobita,

because of its affection for its charge, but as long as Doraemon cannot resist Nobita’s persistent

demands for the easy way out, an illusion presented as technology, Nobita can never grow up in

this popular and enduring anime where “grow up” and “grow older” are similar enough to be

used interchangeably. The irony in the observation that Prime Minister Abe declared 2015 to be

“year one (gannen) of moving towards a “robot society”” (DeWit, 2017) in the country in which

this anime has been so popular for so long, will elude no one. Turkle (2011, p.107) has now

come to expect only disappointing simulacra of intimacy from intelligent personal

technology. She points out how the “caring” robots being developed in Japan can “take care of

us,” but they would not “care about us” (italics in original) and asks, is the performance of care,

care enough? This comes provocatively close to the core contradiction Doraemon chews over

endlessly. Does Doraemon pass the Turning test? All Japanese say so. Then why does

Doraemon’s care have no effect on improving Nobita’s character, and how can this be an

effective model for Mother and mothering?

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Doraemon

Myths model contradictions which social action cannot resolve, and yet, in the face of

which, people must still act. Technology is not going to solve our social problems but it will

produce unintended consequences with which we will eventually have to deal and in time will

probably make matters worse than the original problem. Doraemon lets its audience look at this

reality in a way that lets it laugh now, so we do not have to wait until “someday” to look back

and laugh if we still can. Time stops in Doraemon; the future is now. And Japanese mothers

will continue to raise their children by indulging their need for affection in ways that do not

prepare them to face the outside world, as they inevitably must, and yet does give them an

emotional center to their personality to which they can return for succor again and again

throughout their later lives, by remembering Mother. And we can laugh about these things when

we see them in a fun-house mirror, at any time, nightly on television, even as we do not have to

recognize and acknowledge what we are seeing.

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