This article was published on Financial Times Chinese website
My daughter’s nickname is Tinkerbell, named by my wife, from the Japanese comic strip Tinkerbell Cat. Over the years, I never figured out what to call this comic character’s name. In the first comic book I read as a child, it was called Robot Cat, and later Doraemon. The main character’s name was even stranger, first called Nobita, then Yasuo, then Nobita, it was all random. Two days ago, I went to the memorial hall of the creator Fujiko F. Fujio and realized that the authentic names are Doraemon and Nobita. It’s just that I’m more accustomed to the Chinese names I was first introduced to, Doraemon and Nobita.
The memorial is near the Tamagawa River, not far from the railroad station of Noboribetsu. When we got off the train, the setup on the platform was already reminding us that we had arrived in the land of robot cats. When we left the station, we followed the instructions to find a special train to the memorial, and inside and outside the train were various characters created by the author. I caught a glimpse of the Masked Man in his anti-gravity cape. I hadn’t seen the character for almost 30 years and I couldn’t remember his name, but I felt a small sense of joy that I had met him after a long time.
I’m from the post-70s, probably the first generation to grow up watching Robot Cat. 30 years ago, in Beijing’s newspaper kiosks, bookstands outside the red building on the beach, and at various book markets held regularly, you could always find comic books from Japan, such as Robot Cat, Dragon Ball, Monster Taolang, and Hokuto Jinquan, etc. Every time I came home from school, I had to ask if there were any new arrivals. Every time I came across a bookstore after school, I would ask if there were any new arrivals. Thinking back, at that time to see should be pirated, some stories and the original is different, I do not know if it is a forgery. When I was young, there were no picture books, except for comic books and comic strips. Comics were highly valued, and every book was a treasure. I read them over and over again, to the point where I could memorize them. Of course, at that time, in addition to reading comics and children’s books, there was really nothing to do.
My daughter reads picture books. Hasn’t properly read comics until now. To her, Doraemon is the proper name, and it’s a cartoon character that belongs in the same category as Ultraman. So at the memorial, she ran after the TV screen and wouldn’t look at the originals like I did. She had fun, of course, but it wasn’t as crazy as it was at the Ghibli Museum. My wife and I are just the opposite. In my wife’s words, the Ghibli one is great, of course, but Robot Cat is childhood, after all.
Like the Ghibli Museum, there is a screening room. The movie tickets look like old-fashioned train tickets with different cartoon characters printed on them, which is quite a ritual. The movie itself takes place on a journey, with magical old-fashioned trains, clustered with various cartoon characters. The main characters, however, are still Nopi and Robot Cat.
The movie isn’t long, and to be honest I don’t think it’s as good as the Ghibli Museum shorts. After all, in the field of animation, the latter has a higher status and better business skills. But I don’t know why, but at the end of the movie, my eyes were wet. It was as if a long-buried emotion had roiled over. It started when I got off the subway at Noboribetsu Station, looking at the gongyaki in the window and the slices of bread with the correct answers written on them while standing in line.
There’s an episode of Robot Cat that talks about flipping ropes. Nopi is terrible at learning, but unbeatable at flipping ropes. He uses props to gain recognition from the adults by showing off his flipping skills. That episode became the textbook for my obsessive pursuit of flipping ropes. How to flip the Milky Way is one of the top ten unsolved mysteries of childhood. Two days ago, my daughter suddenly took out a textbook on flipping ropes and studied it with me, and suddenly I saw the solution to the Milky Way, based on the fact that it felt magical.
There’s also an episode where the guys run out to an iceberg and use various props to dig holes in the iceberg, design furniture, and easily make a secret home from their favorites. This episode is probably my favorite story. I’m so jealous of the kids in the story who get to have their own little world.
That’s why I’m grateful to Mr. Fujiko F. Fujio. Childhood is much sadder without those manga stories of his.
But my determination to visit his memorial this time was due to a chat.
My daughter has a very cute classmate, Ono. Ono’s father, Satan-kun, was a painter and folkloric game artist. Once at his home, he took out Fujiko F. Fujio’s SF Shorts from a bookcase of comics and said, “Do you know what RoboCat is drawing? I made up an answer and didn’t get it right. He said that Robot Cat invents a new machine to solve life’s problems in every story, but each time it fails and creates bigger problems. So Fujiko F. Fujio believes that technology cannot solve the essential problems of life.
Listening to Satan-kun, I realized how amazing Robot Cat is. First of all, it’s harder to tell ordinary people’s lives in a way that makes them love them than it is to make up metaphysical stories, let alone make them enjoyable for children. Second, life and superpowers are distinctly separate in stories of the Superman and Man of Steel variety. Simply put, if you have superhuman abilities, you have to deal with superhuman things, make the best use of people, make the best use of things, save the planet and then stop a plane crash or something. But the sci-fi in Robot Cat is used entirely in life. The kids get props and don’t turn into teenage heroes. They only think about dealing with life’s problems, like dealing with parents and teachers, or how to have fun. They don’t use time machines to buy lottery tickets, to sell artifacts, to smuggle with arbitrary doors or to open a logistics company. It’s as if the focus of the children’s concentration is never just how to live their daily lives. What Robot Cat takes out of his pockets are not so much fabulous props as household appliances aimed at improving daily life.
The biggest difference between today’s modern daily life and that of the ancients lies in the prevalence of machines, especially electrical appliances. It can even be said that our lives were originally dependent on the companionship of man and machine. The Industrial Revolution was also a machine revolution. The birth of modern society is also the birth of modern machines. And the daily life of the family is full of electrical appliances, it has to be after the popularization of the city power system. Looking at the timetable, household fans, radios, household refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers were all born in the 1920s.
In the 1950s, Japanese families pursued three major items in their lives: black-and-white television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines. After the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the three major household items were upgraded to color TVs, cars and air conditioners. In this sense, the upgrading of home appliances was a sign of the rapid change in daily life in Japan at that time.
After the 80s, Japanese home appliances entered China. Whether white or black, it can be said that the Chinese people’s current understanding of home appliances, more than 80% from Japan. I remember when I was a child, my family came to a Sony Walkman, and would pose with it and take pictures.
When I was a kid, I would have guests visiting my home when new appliances came in. When we visited other people’s homes, we would also look at what brand of TV they had, color or black and white, 14 inches or 21 inches. The color TV in my uncle’s house was not only big, but also had an extra glass cover, which made me envious.
Yes, the TV. The most important appliance in the house at that time was the TV. My dream was to have my own small color TV so small that I could quietly hide it under the covers. When I went to the mall with adults, I found out that there were actually hand-held small color TVs in the world, and then I looked at the price, which was more than 3,000 at that time. Today, that’s about a year’s income.
In 1970, the World’s Fair was held in Osaka. This was the first time the World’s Fair came to East Asia. In January of the same year, Robot Cat began to be serialized in elementary school publications. In that year Mr. Fujiko was 37 years old and was approaching the age of no return.
The memorial hall is dedicated to Fujiko-sensei’s studio. It is said that he always played classical music, operas or Rakugo work. The overhead shelves are filled with books, movie laserdiscs, model railroads and various ornaments. The table where he worked had ornaments of dinosaurs and dinosaur eggs, and an illustrated book of insect ecology.
The Miyazaki Hayao Museum of Art also has a studio, but it’s much more retro than Mr. Fujiko’s, and looks like the room of a late 19th-century explorer or museum scholar. Hayao Miyazaki is eight years younger than Mr. Fujiko, but seems to be more conservative in his aims than Fujiko.
I love shopping in the old-fashioned department stores of Tokyo. At Takashimaya, a century-old store, years ago, I sat in a lounge chair in the aisle and watched the waitresses wrap boxes of pastries in beautiful wrapping paper. It takes about 17 steps to wrap each one. In the elevator room not far from the counter, every now and then an elevator lady opens the door and asks around, in an extremely polite and gentle voice, if there are any more customers who want to take the elevator.
I think this ritualistic way of working has not changed from about 100 years ago to the present. In those days, people walked into a department store dressed in decent clothes, as if they were walking into a World’s Fair venue. People examined to experience the world’s newest, weirdest, and nicest inventions and artifacts. In addition to clothing and lipstick, people also encountered hair dryers and household vacuum cleaners for the first time. For them, the department store was like a robot cat’s bag, filled with countless objects that could make life better. The artifacts in the windows and on the counters change, the Walkman becomes an electronic player. But the experience is always there, the pursuit and inquiry of new things in life is always there. Whether it is Mr. Fujiko or Mr. Miyazaki, they can imagine the living tradition of a hundred years ago through these places that are still alive, and bring their children to experience this tradition.
In this sense, I still envy Fujiko-sensei. His reflections are built on the continuity of this pursuit of life, and he can fully feel the contrast between before and after time, and thus look to the future. For my generation, on the other hand, the machines of life actually appeared suddenly and surged forward. In the process of growing up, the world changed and changed again, and the sense of novelty hit our hearts and lives extremely strongly. One thing is for sure, if I did have a robot cat around, odds are I would have gotten into much bigger trouble than Nobita Daioh.
I am determined to buy another Doraemon set and read it with my daughter. Anyway, when she came back from the memorial, she said she liked it too.
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